Tony Iommi is having a blast with digital amps: “It can actually be quite hard to tell the difference”
Let it be known that Tony Iommi is far from a tube purist.
Having recently released his first single in three years, Deified, the heavy metal legend shares how he was “very impressed” by the Kemper Profiler he used in his latest recordings.
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“These latest songs were done in my studio,” says Iommi in a new interview with Guitar World. “I either used my Jaydee guitar or my main Gibson SG, possibly both. The guitars were going through my Kemper Profiler.”
“I have to say, I really like the Kemper,” he adds. “It was my producer Mike Exeter who introduced me to it a while back, and I was very impressed. Especially because you didn’t need to have all the speakers mic’d up; you could sit with it next to you in the control room.”
“Mike sampled my Laney tone, and then we improved on that a little bit. I’ve found it to be very useful. And the sound quality is incredible.”
So incredible, in fact, that “it can actually be quite hard to tell the difference between the Kemper and a real amp,” Iommi states.
The Black Sabbath guitarist also notes that while he still loves being in a room “with a head and cabinet” — “just to get that bounce back from the speakers” — “as far as new gear goes, the Kemper has been working very well for me in the studio.”
Iommi is far from the only musician who’s been won over by digital amps of late. Jim Root, for one, has admitted to making the “blasphemous and sacrilegious” switch to digital amp modellers (specifically, the Neural DSP Quad Cortex) for Slipknot’s live shows, while Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett revealed that he has been using the Strymon Iridium for his smaller solo shows.
“It’s so good! I went to the dark side, and I’m not coming back, man,” said Shiflett.
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