Amp modellers are dead. I don’t say that lightly or to be hyperbolic. It’s just true.
Neural amp modeler A2 (architecture 2) was just released recently. This utterly astonishing piece of software lets anyone create extremely realistic captures of their favorite amps and cabinets completely for free and they sound amazing.
We’ve seen this technology before, of course, with the Axe FX and the Line6 Pod and the Quad Cortex Neural DSP, but this makes all of those products totally irrelevant.
I just finished up my lunchtime guitar practice session using nothing but my iPad and a USB audio interface and played a Deezil VH4, a Mesa Boogie Rectifier, a Marshall 100-watt stadium-filling monster and half a dozen other amps, pedals, and effects I could only dream of affording.
NAM run as a plug-in in your favourite DAW. There are also apps for iOS like ToneRig.
But the magic really starts with the website tone3000.com, a central repository where tens of thousands of people have uploaded their IR captures.
I’ll be damned if I can tell a difference between their captures, and the real things I’ve been hearing in records for my whole life.
My mind immediately jumped to how I could build the stompbox of my dreams with a Pi (or similar) at the heart, custom audio routing, etc. Turns out there’s already an excellent base to start such a thing on called Pi Pedal.
Go try it out! It’s completely free, and easy to use. This is such an exciting development in the world of guitar, I wonder how much of this was enabled by AI?
Anywho, I’ll see you on Reverb, I’m selling all my pedals.