amp sims that would be good for bass and guitar? any faves?
With the caveat that I have
not tried the Kemper, I'll offer this:
None of the amp sims that I've tried and liked on guitar did anything for me on bass.
That's probably because all the amp sim manufacturers seem to be spending all their engineering resources on capturing the specific and peculiar timbral characteristics that are unique to a particular amp/cab combination without spending enough resources addressing the thing that is common to
all amp/cab combinations: Moving air.
iow, for a bass part that is not supposed to sound conspicuously effected the only reason I find myself looking beyond a good DI is if I want to add some moving air to the tone. I almost never find myself thinking "geez, this part would be perfect ...if only it were played through a vintage B-15! ...or a Marshall SuperBass w/ the 8x15" double stack!" If I want something
that dramatically different from the clean, dry DI tone I probably want a pedal that adds some variant of dirt, grind, or radical EQ. And if I want something that's just slightly different from the clean, dry DI tone I probably want a real mic on a real speaker to capture some real moving air. None of the amp sims I've used seem to do that well enough to justify their use on bass, and I find that their attempts at simulating that moving air mostly serve to diffuse or obscure the solidity and impact of a good dry bass tone.
Conversely, they nearly all seem to work wonders on guitar, so long as you're not ultra-anal about making super-granular comparisons to the amps they're ostensibly emulating ("ugh, that doesn't sound at all like a 1965 Fender Twin Reverb; it sounds like a 1966 Fender Twin Reverb!")
