Two Notes Opus

Written By Tommy Spooky

I love my Kemper.

Don’t get me wrong.

But it takes as long to boot up as a tube amp can take to warm up and (currently) there’s no way to load Neural amp models on it. I gave in and got a Two Notes Opus off their Reverb shop.

The downside / disappointment:

  • LImited preamps. It can’t host the full Genome range of pre’s

  • No Codex. This is the biggest disappointment and made me consider returning it. I really like using Neural Amp Models in Codex with Genome, and was really hoping to put it on my board for jamming or maybe even actually leaving the house with it. Alas.

  • On its own, it’s a very quiet box. but any pedals in front of it increases the noise floor substantially

  • Even though it supports multiple IRs, it’s still a mono box. It would be nice to have stereo outputs

The upside / why I’m keeping it:

  • Okay it’s one of the best IR boxes for your board. Access to all of Two Note’s DynIR library, the ability to load dual impulse responses and mix them, play with the phase of the two,

  • Midi control, which I haven’t bothered tapping much into since I’m not playing live, but I really need to rectify that.

  • The power amp emulation, while it doesn’t quite matter as much on high gain signals, nicely affects the character of mid-gain and low-gain settings.

  • Switching the internal pre off lets you take advantage of any physical preamps you have, or even use other drive pedals as their own preamp (rat clones like the Black Mass 1312 are great for this imo)

  • It actually is easier to create a wet/dry/wet rig than with the kemper. There is definitely something different between doing wet/dry/wet and just manipulating wet/dry ratio. It’s very convenient to create an aurally BIG clean tone without having to use a LOT of cabs and amps.

In Conclusion

If anybody from TwoNotes ever reads this, the ONE THING they could do to make me buy the next gen of this same product:

Give it enough horsepower to enable full Genome support.

Give me Genome in a box. Between Codex, TwoNotes in-house pre’s, DynIRs, and TwoNotes models of pedals, that would put this little box into direct competition with Kemper Player, Neural DSP’s Nano Cortex, Line 6’s Helix products, and ToneX.

Until then, I’ll continue to use it for what it’s strong at, and work around its weaknesses

Tommy Spooky
Next

New Midi Controller