I've had the ampero for 6 months and it completely changed the way I go about making music. I've sold my amps and now this is my whole rig, for live performance and recording. That's how good it is. I don't want to bore you with a full blown love letter to this little black box, so here goes:
PROS:
- all in one. Amp, effects, recording rig, audio interface, looper, drum machine, tuner. This can literally be all your rig, I'm recording an album this week with my band and I can't tell you enough how satisfactory it is to come to recording sessions with only a guitar, this, and a cable;
- Decent sound. So, the way I like to explain sound quality on these modellers is like a movie. A real valve amp is like 4k, the stock IRs that come with this are 720p-1080p, But if you load one in you get up to 1440p which is plenty for me, and you can find them easily for free online (tip: ampero facebook group). Not that the pre installed IRs are bad, some of them are plenty good, like the marshalls and some of the fenders, it all comes to your personal taste. 4 stars but I think this is the one that gets you closer to the real deal sound-wise in this price range;
- Very customizable. It comes with 4 buttons and you can program what every one of those does, gives you a lot to play with on stage or while recording
- the touch screen is an awesome idea, makes everything much easyer, although you won't be using it much if at all in a live situation.
- Build quality is just ridiculous, this thing is built like a safe, the screen could be a weakness though
Cons:
- It's a little noisy on the higher gain/ crunchy stuff when you have the amp modulation on. Fair enough the real amp would do that too, but It gets a bit annoying on long sessions, especially if you're using low impedance headphones. You can however mitigate this with a noise gate, and it's a non-issue on recordings and live playing;
- If you plan on using the expression pedal a lot, this is not for you. It's cool for controling volume or fx parameters or even a little wah every now and then, but it's very basic and a bit stiff for effortless wah playing;
- the looper is very very basic, very limited controls, Good for practicing or coming up with ideas, but nothing else;
- Some of the fx, as well as some of the amp modulations are not quite up to scratch compared to the rest. But don't worry, all of the important stuff is good. Let's just say that out of the 244 fx, about 40 are really weird and a bit trash, they're really funny to play with though.
Check out Plywood Society on youtube if you want to hear this puppy in a song
