[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":1083},["ShallowReactive",2],{"\u002Fblog\u002Fbest-free-amp-sims":3,"\u002Fblog\u002Fbest-free-amp-sims-related":559},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":547,"date":548,"description":549,"draft":550,"extension":551,"meta":552,"minutes":553,"navigation":554,"path":555,"seo":556,"stem":557,"__hash__":558},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Fbest-free-amp-sims.md","The best free amp sims in 2026",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":526},"minimark",[9,13,16,19,22,25,28,33,36,43,49,55,58,69,75,78,85,88,94,100,111,114,117,127,132,135,138,143,148,151,160,165,168,177,182,186,190,193,198,203,212,217,220,225,230,239,244,247,252,257,266,271,274,277,280,285,290,293,297,302,305,308,311,320,324,452,458,462,465,468,471,489,500,503,506,509,517,520],[10,11,12],"p",{},"I've recorded whole albums through a Kemper. It's a genuinely good way to work: the captures sound like the amps they came from, reamping is painless, and nobody listening to the finished record is going to ask what was in the room.",[10,14,15],{},"It's also expensive, and it's built around captures (its newer Liquid Profiling layers some modeled tone-shaping on top, but the heart of it is still profiling real amps rather than simulating circuits from scratch).",[10,17,18],{},"I've tried all the popular free sims too, and recorded plenty of them. Some of them sound great. You can make a free rig that holds up on a record, and this list is mostly about which ones do that best.",[10,20,21],{},"But I've never found a free amp sim that does more than one job well and also feels like a tube amp. Sounds like one, sometimes, absolutely. Feels like one is a different bar.",[10,23,24],{},"So this is the list I wish someone had handed me. Eight free amp sims that earn their disk space, what each is actually good at, and where I'd start if I were installing my first one tonight.",[10,26,27],{},"Fair warning about my bias: I'm building an amp sim. It's not on this list, and the last section explains why. Everything above that section is written the way I'd tell a friend at a rehearsal, because a list that quietly steers you toward my thing would be worth exactly nothing to you.",[29,30,32],"h2",{"id":31},"what-free-actually-means-here","What \"free\" actually means here",[10,34,35],{},"Three different things wear the word.",[10,37,38,42],{},[39,40,41],"strong",{},"Actually free."," Download it, use it forever, no account, no nag screen. Ignite Amps and Blue Cat's Free Amp live here.",[10,44,45,48],{},[39,46,47],{},"Free tier of a paid suite."," Real, useful, and permanently free, but built as the front door to a store. AmpliTube Custom Shop and Guitar Rig Player are these. Nothing wrong with the model as long as you know you're standing in a lobby.",[10,50,51,54],{},[39,52,53],{},"Free and open source."," The code is public and the format is yours. Neural Amp Modeler is the big one, and it changed this whole category in a few years.",[10,56,57],{},"I've marked which is which below, because \"free\" doing three jobs is how people end up surprised.",[29,59,61,62],{"id":60},"_1-neural-amp-modeler","1. ",[63,64,68],"a",{"href":65,"rel":66},"https:\u002F\u002Fneuralampmodeler.com",[67],"nofollow","Neural Amp Modeler",[10,70,71],{},[72,73,74],"em",{},"Free and open source. Windows and macOS officially, Linux through community ports.",[10,76,77],{},"NAM is the most important thing to happen to free amp sims in a decade, and it isn't close.",[10,79,80,81,84],{},"The idea: instead of modeling an amp's circuit, you record what the amp ",[72,82,83],{},"does",". Feed a known signal in, record what comes out, train a small neural network on the pair. What you get is a capture, a file that sounds startlingly like the rig it was taken from. Then thousands of people did this to their rigs and gave the files away.",[10,86,87],{},"That last part is the actual innovation. The tone library is enormous, free, and community-owned. You can spend a weekend playing through amps you'll never afford and never see.",[10,89,90,93],{},[39,91,92],{},"Where it shines:"," raw sound-alike quality on a specific rig at a specific setting. If someone captured a good amp well, the capture is convincing in a way that embarrasses a lot of paid modeling from just a few years ago.",[10,95,96,99],{},[39,97,98],{},"The catch:"," a capture is a photograph. It's taken at the knob positions somebody else had set when they recorded it, through the tubes they happened to have in the amp that day. NAM's plugin gives you tone controls afterward, but those sit downstream of the capture rather than being the amp's own knobs re-solving. Turn the gain down on a cranked capture and you get a quieter cranked capture.",[10,101,102,103,106,107,110],{},"Every capture-based tool has this ",[39,104,105],{},"one-setting ceiling",", my Kemper included. It's what a capture ",[72,108,109],{},"is",", and it's worth understanding before you build a rig on top of one. You're playing someone else's decisions: their knob positions, their tubes, their room, their good day.",[10,112,113],{},"Kemper and NAM both do a really excellent job at applying generically what rolling the gain knob back should do to an amp, but they CAN'T respond the same way a real amp does. The gain knob on a high gain metal amp and the gain knob on a classic British amp are very different things.",[10,115,116],{},"That's a completely fine trade for a lot of music. It's the wrong trade if what you actually wanted was the amp.",[29,118,120,121,126],{"id":119},"_2-ignite-amps-emissary-tpa-1-nadir","2. ",[63,122,125],{"href":123,"rel":124},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.igniteamps.com",[67],"Ignite Amps"," (Emissary, TPA-1, NadIR)",[10,128,129],{},[72,130,131],{},"Actually free, donationware. Windows, macOS.",[10,133,134],{},"Two Italian engineers who also build real tube amps, giving away plugins that outclass things people charge money for. Emissary is a full dual-channel amp with a serious high-gain lead side, TPA-1 is a tube power amp you pair with a preamp, and NadIR is a zero-latency IR loader a lot of people (me included) reach for first.",[10,136,137],{},"If you play anything heavy and you install exactly one thing off this list, install Emissary. I've used it a lot and it can be genuinely great.",[10,139,140,142],{},[39,141,92],{}," high gain that stays tight and musical once you pair it with a good IR, and a cab loader that doesn't fight you.",[10,144,145,147],{},[39,146,98],{}," the interfaces look like 2013, and the range is deliberately narrow. These are a few very good amps rather than a suite.",[10,149,150],{},"And the honest note from my own ears: at its best, it still doesn't feel like playing through a tube amp. Two engineers are giving away excellent work for free here, and the ceiling I'm describing belongs to the whole category rather than to them. It is genuinely good and can work very well for heavy music mixes.",[29,152,154,155],{"id":153},"_3-amplitube-5-custom-shop","3. ",[63,156,159],{"href":157,"rel":158},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.ikmultimedia.com\u002Fproducts\u002Famplitube5\u002F",[67],"AmpliTube 5 Custom Shop",[10,161,162],{},[72,163,164],{},"Free tier of a paid suite. Windows, macOS.",[10,166,167],{},"The free tier of IK's big suite gives you a working rig: a handful of amps, cabs, stomps, and the full signal-chain builder. It's genuinely playable and it's the tier most people's first amp sim experience runs through.",[10,169,170,172,173,176],{},[39,171,92],{}," breadth of the ",[72,174,175],{},"system",". You learn how amp, cab, mic placement, and pedals stack, which is knowledge that transfers everywhere else.",[10,178,179,181],{},[39,180,98],{}," the store is the point. Expect to be sold to, and expect the good stuff to be behind a purchase. IK runs frequent sales and promotions, so if a steady stream of discount emails grates on you, know it going in.",[29,183,185],{"id":184},"_4-guitar-rig-7-player","4. Guitar Rig 7 Player",[10,187,188],{},[72,189,164],{},[10,191,192],{},"Native Instruments' free tier: two amps (a boutique-American clean and a British-style crunch), a small set of effects, and the same rack the paid version uses.",[10,194,195,197],{},[39,196,92],{}," the effects rack, honestly, more than the amp. It's a clean, stable, well-built piece of software from a company that isn't going anywhere, and the free tier is a real tool rather than a demo.",[10,199,200,202],{},[39,201,98],{}," two amps. You'll outgrow the amp side faster than the others here, though the effects rack keeps earning its place long after.",[29,204,206,207],{"id":205},"_5-amped-roots-free","5. ",[63,208,211],{"href":209,"rel":210},"https:\u002F\u002Fml-sound-lab.com\u002Fproducts\u002Famped-roots",[67],"Amped Roots Free",[10,213,214],{},[72,215,216],{},"Actually free (registration required). Windows, macOS.",[10,218,219],{},"ML Sound Lab's free cut-down of a paid modern-metal plugin (built with Ryan \"Fluff\" Bruce). Amp, cab section, noise gate, all in one window with almost nothing to configure.",[10,221,222,224],{},[39,223,92],{}," speed. Load it, pick a preset, play. For a scratch track or a riff you need to capture before you lose it, less setup is a real feature.",[10,226,227,229],{},[39,228,98],{}," narrow by design, and you register to get it.",[29,231,233,234],{"id":232},"_6-blue-cats-free-amp","6. ",[63,235,238],{"href":236,"rel":237},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.bluecataudio.com\u002FProducts\u002FProduct_FreeAmp\u002F",[67],"Blue Cat's Free Amp",[10,240,241],{},[72,242,243],{},"Actually free. Windows, macOS, and it ranks well for a reason.",[10,245,246],{},"Three amp models, cab sim, and Blue Cat's usual attention to plugin engineering. It sits near the top of the free-amp-sim search results and mostly deserves it.",[10,248,249,251],{},[39,250,92],{}," it behaves. Low CPU, no drama, works in every host, and the company has been quietly shipping good audio software for 20 years.",[10,253,254,256],{},[39,255,98],{}," the models are competent rather than exciting.",[29,258,260,261],{"id":259},"_7-livespice","7. ",[63,262,265],{"href":263,"rel":264},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.livespice.org",[67],"LiveSPICE",[10,267,268],{},[72,269,270],{},"Free and open source. Windows only.",[10,272,273],{},"Different animal entirely, and I'd feel dishonest leaving it off.",[10,275,276],{},"LiveSPICE simulates the actual circuit in real time. You draw a schematic, and it solves the electronics while you play through it. The circuit itself, running.",[10,278,279],{},"It proved years ago that you could do this on a normal computer in real time. It's an extraordinary piece of work and it's free to study, which is rarer than it sounds.",[10,281,282,284],{},[39,283,92],{}," it's the only thing on this list where changing a part changes the sound the way changing a part changes the sound.",[10,286,287,289],{},[39,288,98],{}," it's Windows-only, built on a UI stack (WPF) that appears to genuinely pin it there, and its last real release was Preview 15 back in early 2024, with only a build-maintenance commit since. It also asks you to know what a schematic is. This is a tool for the curious rather than a plug-and-play rig.",[10,291,292],{},"It's also the one entry here that answers the question captures dodge. Solve the circuit instead of the recording, and the ceiling goes away.",[29,294,296],{"id":295},"_8-free-impulse-responses-the-fizz-tax","8. Free impulse responses (the fizz tax)",[10,298,299],{},[72,300,301],{},"Actually free. Everywhere.",[10,303,304],{},"A cab thing rather than an amp thing, and the highest-leverage free download in the category.",[10,306,307],{},"An impulse response is a snapshot of a speaker cabinet in a room with a mic on it. Swapping the IR under any amp above changes the sound more than swapping the amp does. Most people chasing \"my tone sounds fizzy\" are paying the fizz tax: blaming the amp for something the cab is doing.",[10,309,310],{},"Grab a free IR pack, load it in NadIR or your amp sim's own loader, and spend an hour on it. It's the cheapest large improvement available.",[10,312,313,314,319],{},"For a GREAT example, check out ",[63,315,318],{"href":316,"rel":317},"https:\u002F\u002Fwilkinsonaudio.com\u002Fproducts\u002Fgods-cab",[67],"God's Cab by Wilkinson Audio",".",[29,321,323],{"id":322},"the-short-version","The short version",[325,326,327,346],"table",{},[328,329,330],"thead",{},[331,332,333,337,340,343],"tr",{},[334,335,336],"th",{},"Sim",[334,338,339],{},"Type",[334,341,342],{},"Best at",[334,344,345],{},"Free how",[347,348,349,363,376,390,402,414,426,439],"tbody",{},[331,350,351,354,357,360],{},[352,353,68],"td",{},[352,355,356],{},"Capture",[352,358,359],{},"Sounding like one specific rig",[352,361,362],{},"Open source",[331,364,365,367,370,373],{},[352,366,125],{},[352,368,369],{},"Modeled",[352,371,372],{},"High gain, and a great IR loader",[352,374,375],{},"Donationware",[331,377,378,381,384,387],{},[352,379,380],{},"AmpliTube Custom Shop",[352,382,383],{},"Modeled suite",[352,385,386],{},"Learning the whole signal chain",[352,388,389],{},"Free tier",[331,391,392,395,397,400],{},[352,393,394],{},"Guitar Rig 7 Player",[352,396,383],{},[352,398,399],{},"Effects, stability",[352,401,389],{},[331,403,404,406,408,411],{},[352,405,211],{},[352,407,369],{},[352,409,410],{},"Fast riff capture",[352,412,413],{},"Free, registration",[331,415,416,418,420,423],{},[352,417,238],{},[352,419,369],{},[352,421,422],{},"Reliability, low CPU",[352,424,425],{},"Free",[331,427,428,430,433,436],{},[352,429,265],{},[352,431,432],{},"Circuit sim",[352,434,435],{},"Changing actual components",[352,437,438],{},"Open source, Windows",[331,440,441,444,447,450],{},[352,442,443],{},"Free IR packs",[352,445,446],{},"Cab",[352,448,449],{},"Fixing fizz",[352,451,425],{},[10,453,454,457],{},[39,455,456],{},"Where I'd start:"," NAM plus a free IR pack, and Emissary if you play heavy. That's a rig most people would have paid four figures for in 2010, and it costs a download.",[29,459,461],{"id":460},"what-im-building-and-why-it-isnt-on-this-list","What I'm building, and why it isn't on this list",[10,463,464],{},"I'm building Cathode. It isn't on this list because you can't download it, and a list of free amp sims you can't download would be an advertisement wearing a costume.",[10,466,467],{},"The reason I started is smaller than a business plan. I wanted to understand how tube amps work at the depth where you're designing one yourself, and I wanted to do that without a live high-voltage circuit sitting on a bench in a house with kids in it. When I went looking for software that would let me do that, the list was one item long. LiveSPICE, Windows only, quiet for years. That's the whole market.",[10,469,470],{},"So Cathode plays amps as live circuits rather than captures. Turn the tone knob and the whole amp re-solves, the way it does on a real amp where tone and volume argue over the same signal. That's the one-setting ceiling, gone, and the knobs are the amp's own.",[10,472,473,474,478,479,483,484,488],{},"It comes in two pieces. ",[63,475,477],{"href":476},"\u002Fplayer","Cathode Player"," is free and plays any amp the community designs. ",[63,480,482],{"href":481},"\u002Fdesigner","Cathode Designer"," is where you open one up and change the parts, down to the component. ",[63,485,487],{"href":486},"\u002Fpricing","Pricing"," is one page with no asterisks on it.",[10,490,491,492,495,496,499],{},"I'm going to skip the accuracy fight entirely. A good capture of a real amp is very hard to beat on pure sound-alike, and picking that argument would be picking one I deserve to lose. What a live circuit gives you instead is ",[72,493,494],{},"aliveness"," and ",[72,497,498],{},"control",": roll the volume back going into a verse and the amp cleans up the way the real thing does, rather than just getting quieter.",[10,501,502],{},"Will it feel like a tube amp? I genuinely don't know yet. What I do know is that it's simulating the real circuit, which gives it a better shot than a recording of one ever gets.",[10,504,505],{},"Here's the part I'm actually building toward, and I want to be clear it's a direction rather than a feature list. Every amp is a file you can read, share, and change. You find a mod you've always wanted to hear, you hand the mod and the amp file to something like ChatGPT, and it hands you back the modded amp. You load it and play it. No soldering iron, no second-hand chassis, no wondering whether you'd have wrecked a mint amp to find out.",[10,507,508],{},"Paid tools do some of this beautifully. To my ears UAD makes some of the best-sounding amp software there is. You're still limited to the amps they chose to make, and the ones nobody has made yet stay unmade.",[10,510,511,512,516],{},"None of this is downloadable. Everything I've actually finished is on the ",[63,513,515],{"href":514},"\u002Fstatus","status board",", which carries status labels and no dates on them, because nobody honestly knows how long it takes to invent something. When there's something to download, the email list hears first, and there'll be audio attached rather than a mockup.",[10,518,519],{},"In the meantime, go install Emissary. It's free, it's excellent, and it'll get you further than most things you can buy.",[10,521,522,523,525],{},"When it's ready to play, ",[63,524,477],{"href":476}," will be free too.",{"title":527,"searchDepth":528,"depth":528,"links":529},"",2,[530,531,533,535,537,538,540,542,544,545,546],{"id":31,"depth":528,"text":32},{"id":60,"depth":528,"text":532},"1. Neural Amp Modeler",{"id":119,"depth":528,"text":534},"2. Ignite Amps (Emissary, TPA-1, NadIR)",{"id":153,"depth":528,"text":536},"3. AmpliTube 5 Custom Shop",{"id":184,"depth":528,"text":185},{"id":205,"depth":528,"text":539},"5. Amped Roots Free",{"id":232,"depth":528,"text":541},"6. Blue Cat's Free Amp",{"id":259,"depth":528,"text":543},"7. LiveSPICE",{"id":295,"depth":528,"text":296},{"id":322,"depth":528,"text":323},{"id":460,"depth":528,"text":461},"Guide","2026-07-22","Eight free amp sims that are genuinely worth your drive space, ranked honestly by someone building a competitor. What each one is actually good at, and the ceiling every capture-based tool shares.",false,"md",{},9,true,"\u002Fblog\u002Fbest-free-amp-sims",{"title":5,"description":549},"blog\u002Fbest-free-amp-sims","l34i_OnwcTi_vvma-YrzR9Y0Hul6jlomLTr2juDWmAs",[560,788,886],{"id":561,"title":562,"body":563,"category":547,"date":780,"description":781,"draft":550,"extension":551,"meta":782,"minutes":783,"navigation":554,"path":784,"seo":785,"stem":786,"__hash__":787},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Famp-modeler-hardware-vs-software.md","Amp modeler in 2026: hardware vs software",{"type":7,"value":564,"toc":772},[565,568,571,574,578,581,587,593,601,605,608,614,620,626,632,638,645,649,655,661,667,673,679,682,686,693,699,702,705,708,712,718,724,730,736,740,743,746,749,752,755,758,764,767],[10,566,567],{},"A friend of mine plays about 90 shows a year through a Helix. In the years he's owned it, he has never once thought about it during a set. It boots, it's the same as it was last night, he plays.",[10,569,570],{},"That's the whole argument for a hardware amp modeler, and it's a genuinely good one if that's what you're looking for. Anybody who tells you the laptop is simply better has not loaded out of a venue at 1am.",[10,572,573],{},"I record at home, mostly through software, and I've made whole records through a Kemper. So I've been on both sides of this, and I want to lay out what each one actually wins before I tell you what I'm building, because I am obviously not a neutral party here.",[29,575,577],{"id":576},"two-things-wearing-the-same-name","Two things wearing the same name",[10,579,580],{},"A digital amp modeler is any device or plugin that produces an amplifier's sound without the amplifier. That's the whole category, and it splits on packaging rather than on approach.",[10,582,583,586],{},[39,584,585],{},"Hardware."," A floor unit or rack box with the processing inside it. Helix, Quad Cortex, Kemper, the Fractal boxes, the Tonex pedal, and the newer pedals that play Neural Amp Modeler captures.",[10,588,589,592],{},[39,590,591],{},"Software."," A plugin or standalone app running on a computer you already own. NAM, the free tiers, the big paid suites.",[10,594,595,596,600],{},"Both do the same job. If the underlying idea is fuzzy (what a capture is, what modeling means, why any of it matters), I wrote ",[63,597,599],{"href":598},"\u002Fblog\u002Fwhat-is-an-amp-sim","a plain-English explainer"," that covers it properly. This piece assumes you know roughly what an amp sim does and are trying to decide where to put your money.",[29,602,604],{"id":603},"what-the-box-genuinely-wins","What the box genuinely wins",[10,606,607],{},"Some of this gets waved away by people who only ever record. It shouldn't be.",[10,609,610,613],{},[39,611,612],{},"It boots."," No OS update landed overnight. No audio driver decided today was the day. No plugin host asking about a license while a room full of people watches you.",[10,615,616,619],{},[39,617,618],{},"Latency is settled at the factory."," You're not tuning a buffer size against your CPU load. Somebody solved it once, on hardware they controlled, and shipped it.",[10,621,622,625],{},[39,623,624],{},"Footswitches are real switches."," Preset changes with your foot, at gig speed, without a MIDI controller and a mapping session.",[10,627,628,631],{},[39,629,630],{},"One box, one signal path."," In and out. No interface, no computer, no second thing to carry that also has your email on it.",[10,633,634,637],{},[39,635,636],{},"It holds value."," This one gets underrated. Used Kempers and Helixes still sell for real money years later. Software doesn't have a resale market at all, so a $1,700 box that you use for 5 years and sell for $900 costs less than the sticker suggests.",[10,639,640,641,644],{},"Put together, you're buying ",[39,642,643],{},"the frozen advantage",": a thing that will be identical tonight, next month, and in 3 years. On a stage, being finished is the highest virtue an object can have.",[29,646,648],{"id":647},"what-the-laptop-wins","What the laptop wins",[10,650,651,654],{},[39,652,653],{},"Price, by an order of magnitude."," The free end of software is really good now. You can build a rig that holds up on a record for the cost of a download.",[10,656,657,660],{},[39,658,659],{},"Screen."," Editing on a 27-inch display beats editing on a small on-unit screen, and it isn't close. Every flagship ships a free desktop editor (HX Edit, Cortex Control, Axe-Edit), and in my experience a lot of the real preset-building ends up happening there.",[10,662,663,666],{},[39,664,665],{},"It updates."," New features land while you own it. Hardware gets firmware, which is real, but the ceiling is the DSP they shipped inside the enclosure.",[10,668,669,672],{},[39,670,671],{},"It's already in the session."," Reamping, printing 4 versions of a part, automating a gain change across a bridge. Living inside the DAW makes all of that ordinary.",[10,674,675,678],{},[39,676,677],{},"No opinion about what you play through it."," Any interface, any headphones, any monitors.",[10,680,681],{},"The catch is the one my friend never has to think about. A computer is a general-purpose machine running 40 things you didn't ask for, and one of them will eventually pick a bad moment.",[29,683,685],{"id":684},"the-decision-underneath-both","The decision underneath both",[10,687,688,689,692],{},"Hardware and software split on packaging. Underneath, the overwhelming majority of both are doing the same thing: playing back a ",[39,690,691],{},"capture",", which is a recording of what one amp did at one set of knob positions, on one day, through the tubes it happened to have in it.",[10,694,695,696,698],{},"A $1,700 floor unit playing a capture and a free plugin playing the same capture share a ceiling. Turn the tone knob on either one and you're moving a generic EQ that sits downstream of the recording. The amp's own tone circuit was frozen at capture time and it stays frozen. That ",[39,697,105],{}," belongs to the approach rather than to any brand.",[10,700,701],{},"Kemper and NAM both do a really good job of approximating what rolling back the gain should do. They can't respond the way the amp responds, because the gain control on a high-gain amp and the gain control on a classic British-voiced amp are different circuits doing different things to different parts of the signal.",[10,703,704],{},"For a lot of music this trade is completely fine. You found a tone you love, the capture holds it, you go make the record. It's the wrong trade when the thing you actually wanted was the amp, with its whole range live under your hands.",[10,706,707],{},"So the shopping question people ask (\"box or laptop?\") sorts out reliability and workflow. It doesn't touch the thing most people are describing when they say a sim doesn't feel right.",[29,709,711],{"id":710},"how-id-actually-choose","How I'd actually choose",[10,713,714,717],{},[39,715,716],{},"Gigging regularly, especially without a tech:"," hardware. This isn't close. Buy the box, learn it once, stop thinking about it. The frozen advantage is worth every dollar when 200 people are waiting.",[10,719,720,723],{},[39,721,722],{},"Recording at home, mostly alone:"," software. Start free, spend nothing, spend the saved money on an interface and a decent pair of headphones instead. You will hear more improvement from a better cab impulse response than from a more expensive amp model.",[10,725,726,729],{},[39,727,728],{},"Both, on a budget:"," software plus a cheap MIDI foot controller gets you 80% of the hardware experience for rehearsal, and you'll know within 2 months whether the last 20% is worth $1,500 to you.",[10,731,732,735],{},[39,733,734],{},"You mostly want to tinker:"," neither category is really built for you, which is the thing I ran into and why I ended up here.",[29,737,739],{"id":738},"what-im-building-and-my-bias","What I'm building, and my bias",[10,741,742],{},"I'm building Cathode, so read the last section with that in mind.",[10,744,745],{},"It started smaller than a business plan. I wanted to understand tube amps at the depth where you're designing one, and I wanted to do that without a live high-voltage chassis sitting on a bench in a house with kids in it. The software that would let me do that was one item long, Windows only, and quiet for years.",[10,747,748],{},"Cathode plays amps as live circuits. The circuit solves in real time, at every knob position, so turning the tone control moves that amp's own tone circuit and the whole thing re-solves around it: the highs move, the feel changes, the breakup shifts with you, the way it does on the real thing where tone and volume argue over the same signal.",[10,750,751],{},"A good capture of a real amp is very hard to beat on pure sound-alike. What a live circuit offers instead is aliveness and control across the whole range of the knobs.",[10,753,754],{},"It's software, which means it inherits everything in the laptop column above, including the part where a computer occasionally picks a bad moment. If you gig 90 nights a year, buy the box. I mean that.",[10,756,757],{},"And it interoperates rather than asking you to leave anything. Cathode exports NAM profiles, so a design can go straight into the workflow you already have.",[10,759,760,761,763],{},"Everything I've finished so far is on the ",[63,762,515],{"href":514},", with status labels and no dates on them, because nobody honestly knows how long it takes to invent something.",[10,765,766],{},"A capture remembers what an amp did once. A live circuit is still arguing with itself every time you touch a knob.",[10,768,522,769,771],{},[63,770,477],{"href":476}," will be free.",{"title":527,"searchDepth":528,"depth":528,"links":773},[774,775,776,777,778,779],{"id":576,"depth":528,"text":577},{"id":603,"depth":528,"text":604},{"id":647,"depth":528,"text":648},{"id":684,"depth":528,"text":685},{"id":710,"depth":528,"text":711},{"id":738,"depth":528,"text":739},"2026-07-23","A working guitarist's comparison of hardware amp modelers and software amp sims, from someone building one. What the box wins, what the laptop wins, and the design decision underneath both that decides how the knobs behave.",{},8,"\u002Fblog\u002Famp-modeler-hardware-vs-software",{"title":562,"description":781},"blog\u002Famp-modeler-hardware-vs-software","1Q4ikGT7dT5Zj_w_wong_bTd-xaDrYNdkXdFIiXifX8",{"id":789,"title":790,"body":791,"category":547,"date":780,"description":880,"draft":550,"extension":551,"meta":881,"minutes":882,"navigation":554,"path":598,"seo":883,"stem":884,"__hash__":885},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Fwhat-is-an-amp-sim.md","What an amp sim actually is, and the one thing Cathode does differently",{"type":7,"value":792,"toc":873},[793,796,799,803,806,809,813,816,819,822,826,829,832,835,838,841,845,848,851,854,857,860,862,865,868],[10,794,795],{},"You load a free capture of a famous tweed amp. Sounds great. Then you roll the tone knob back, the way you would on the real thing, and something's off. It gets darker, sure. But it doesn't get darker the way that the real amp gets darker. It just sounds dead.",[10,797,798],{},"That gap is the whole story.",[29,800,802],{"id":801},"whats-an-amp-sim","What's an amp sim?",[10,804,805],{},"An amp sim is software that makes a guitar amplifier's sound without the amplifier. You plug in through an interface, the sim does the work a tube amp would do, and you hear it through headphones or monitors. No 40-pound combo, no mic, no neighbors filing complaints.",[10,807,808],{},"That's the category. Every amp sim is trying to give you amp tone from a laptop. They just go about it in very different ways, and the way matters more than the marketing lets on.",[29,810,812],{"id":811},"two-ways-to-fake-an-amp","Two ways to fake an amp",[10,814,815],{},"Broadly, there are two.",[10,817,818],{},"The older way is modeling: someone studies an amp and writes code that behaves like its parts. Good modeling sounds convincing and responds to your playing. It's also slow, expensive work, which is why the amps that get modeled tend to be the same twenty famous ones.",[10,820,821],{},"The newer way is capturing (NAM, ToneX, Kemper all live here). You point software at a real amp, feed it test tones, and it learns to imitate the sound coming out. The result is a small file anyone can share. That's why you can download thousands of free captures of gear you'll never own, all for nothing.",[29,823,825],{"id":824},"a-capture-is-a-photograph","A capture is a photograph",[10,827,828],{},"A capture learns one amp at one set of knob positions. Volume here, tone there, gain right about there. It's a photograph of the amp at that instant.",[10,830,831],{},"A great photograph. But you can't reach into a photograph and turn a knob.",[10,833,834],{},"So when you drag the tone control in a capture player, the knob you're dragging is a generic EQ the software puts on top, the same one sitting on top of every capture you load. The amp's own tone circuit was frozen the moment it was captured, and it stays frozen.",[10,836,837],{},"This is why it sounds perfect at that one setting and the edges feel wrong. On the real amp, turning down the volume does more than get quieter. The whole thing re-voices: the highs pull back, the feel softens, it breaks up differently. A frozen snapshot can't follow, because it only knows the one setting it was born in.",[10,839,840],{},"None of this makes captures bad. For a fixed tone you love, a capture is perfect, and it's free. It just means a capture's knobs are a generic control sitting on the amp's name, not the amp's own. Most players make peace with that without ever quite naming it.",[29,842,844],{"id":843},"what-cathode-does-differently","What Cathode does differently",[10,846,847],{},"Cathode plays amps as living circuits.",[10,849,850],{},"A Cathode amp is the actual circuit, running in real time, at every knob position. So when you turn Volume, you're turning that amp's own volume control, and the whole circuit responds the way the real one does: the tone shifts, the feel changes, the breakup moves with you. Every knob on the amp is the amp's own, because there's a live circuit running under it.",[10,852,853],{},"That's the one difference everything else follows from. A good capture nails a single setting; a Cathode amp stays alive across all of them, with real control over the whole range.",[10,855,856],{},"And because a Cathode amp is a circuit and not a fixed recording, it can be any amp someone designs, including ones that were never built. The free Player loads whatever the community shares. You get the full range of an amp, and a growing shelf of amps that don't exist anywhere else.",[10,858,859],{},"It fits the workflow you already have, too. If you live in NAM, Cathode exports NAM profiles, so nothing traps you. Come in, look around, leave whenever. Cathode doesn't ask you to give that up.",[29,861,323],{"id":322},[10,863,864],{},"An amp sim gives you amp tone without the amp. A capture does it by photographing an amp at one setting, so its knobs are a generic EQ on a frozen sound. Cathode does it by running the amp as a live circuit, so every knob is the amp's own and the whole thing moves the way a real amp moves.",[10,866,867],{},"The knob only matters if something's still alive underneath it.",[10,869,522,870,872],{},[63,871,477],{"href":476}," will be free. Turn a knob and hear it for yourself.",{"title":527,"searchDepth":528,"depth":528,"links":874},[875,876,877,878,879],{"id":801,"depth":528,"text":802},{"id":811,"depth":528,"text":812},{"id":824,"depth":528,"text":825},{"id":843,"depth":528,"text":844},{"id":322,"depth":528,"text":323},"A plain-English guide to amp sims, captures, and the difference between a photograph of an amp and the amp itself.",{},6,{"title":790,"description":880},"blog\u002Fwhat-is-an-amp-sim","L1JUZRXKAwIHAZsh6fbpiDxCRVYfN_e-Fcz-4k0RIjw",{"id":887,"title":888,"body":889,"category":547,"date":780,"description":1077,"draft":550,"extension":551,"meta":1078,"minutes":783,"navigation":554,"path":1079,"seo":1080,"stem":1081,"__hash__":1082},"blog\u002Fblog\u002Fwhat-is-neural-amp-modeler.md","What is Neural Amp Modeler (NAM)? A plain-English guide",{"type":7,"value":890,"toc":1068},[891,894,897,900,904,907,914,917,921,924,927,934,937,941,944,951,954,957,961,964,969,977,980,984,987,990,996,1006,1009,1013,1016,1023,1026,1037,1040,1043,1047,1050,1056,1059,1065],[10,892,893],{},"Somewhere right now a kid with a $120 practice guitar is playing through a $10,000 amp he'll never touch, in a room he'll never stand in, and it costs him nothing. He downloaded a file. He dropped it into a free plugin. That's the whole transaction.",[10,895,896],{},"The file is a NAM profile. The plugin is Neural Amp Modeler. There's a neural net doing the work, but the reason a working guitarist should care is simpler than the AI: it's the shelf. Thousands of amps and pedals, captured by real people, given away for free.",[10,898,899],{},"This is a guide to how that works, why it caught fire, and the one honest thing a capture can't do. If you never install a single plugin after reading it, you'll still understand your gear better than you did an hour ago.",[29,901,903],{"id":902},"what-nam-actually-is","What NAM actually is",[10,905,906],{},"Neural Amp Modeler is free, open-source software that captures the sound of a real guitar amp and plays it back.",[10,908,909,910,913],{},"It was created by ",[39,911,912],{},"Steven Atkinson",", a machine-learning engineer who started it as a for-fun project and open-sourced it. The code lives on GitHub under the MIT license, which is about as permissive as software licenses get: anyone can use it, build on it, ship it in their own product. That single decision is why NAM is now everywhere instead of being one guy's clever demo.",[10,915,916],{},"The plugin most people run went from a few hundred users to going properly viral over the course of 2023. It's a VST3 and AU plugin for Windows and macOS, it runs standalone if you don't want a DAW open, and the community maintains an LV2 build for Linux. Free, all of it.",[29,918,920],{"id":919},"how-a-capture-gets-made","How a capture gets made",[10,922,923],{},"You don't need the math, and I'm not going to give it to you. Here's the honest shape of it.",[10,925,926],{},"You take a real amp. You feed a known test signal through it: a specific, agreed-upon stream of sound. You record exactly what comes back out the other side. Now you have two recordings, the \"before\" and the \"after,\" and the difference between them is everything the amp did to the sound.",[10,928,929,930,933],{},"A small neural network studies that difference until it can fake it. Feed the trained net a dry guitar signal and it produces what the amp would have produced. When it's good enough, you export the result as a ",[39,931,932],{},".nam file",", usually a few megabytes, small enough to email.",[10,935,936],{},"That file is the capture. It's a recording of one amp doing its thing, frozen into a shape you can share. Which is the exact detail that matters later, so hold onto it.",[29,938,940],{"id":939},"why-it-exploded-the-tone-commons","Why it exploded: the tone commons",[10,942,943],{},"The technology is genuinely impressive. What actually made NAM win happened off to the side of the tech, out in the community.",[10,945,946,947,950],{},"NAM won because of ",[39,948,949],{},"the tone commons",": a free, community-owned library of captures that anyone can add to and anyone can pull from. The main hub is a site now called TONE3000 (it used to be ToneHunt). Thousands of profiles sit there: vintage cleans, boutique boredom-killers, high-gain monsters, bass rigs, single pedals, whole signal chains. People capture their prized gear and just give it away.",[10,952,953],{},"Think about what that replaces. The old way to hear a legendary amp was to buy it, or buy a pricey modeler with that amp baked in by a company. The tone commons routes around both. One person owns the amp, captures it once, and ten thousand people play it for free forever.",[10,955,956],{},"No company curates that shelf. No release schedule gates it. It grows because guitarists like showing off their gear, which turns out to be a bottomless renewable resource.",[29,958,960],{"id":959},"how-you-actually-play-a-nam-capture","How you actually play a NAM capture",[10,962,963],{},"A .nam file does nothing on its own. You need something to load it into. You've got options, and they split cleanly into software and hardware.",[10,965,966,968],{},[39,967,591],{}," Run the free NAM plugin inside your DAW (Logic, Reaper, Ableton, whatever you use), or run it standalone for practice. You load a .nam capture, usually add a cabinet impulse response for the speaker part, and play. That's the cheapest path to a serious tone that exists: $0, assuming you already own an interface.",[10,970,971,973,974,319],{},[39,972,585],{}," This is newer and moving fast. A German outfit called Dimehead makes a dedicated pedal, the NAM Player, that loads .nam files directly. Beyond that, a growing list of multi-effects units have added NAM support, some via firmware updates, some by converting the file to their own format first. If you gig and you've been weighing a floor unit against a laptop on stage, that's its own rabbit hole, and I wrote about the tradeoffs in ",[63,975,976],{"href":784},"software vs hardware amp modelers",[10,978,979],{},"Where do the captures come from? Mostly the tone commons: download from TONE3000, drop into your loader, done. Or capture your own gear, if you've got an amp worth freezing.",[29,981,983],{"id":982},"nam-vs-tonex-vs-kemper-kept-fair","NAM vs ToneX vs Kemper, kept fair",[10,985,986],{},"These three get compared constantly, and the comparison is fair because they're cousins. All three capture a real piece of gear and play it back. Same family, same core idea.",[10,988,989],{},"The differences are about the ecosystem, not the concept.",[10,991,992,995],{},[39,993,994],{},"NAM"," is free and open-source, and its tone library is enormous and community-owned. That's the whole pitch, and it's a strong one.",[10,997,998,1001,1002,1005],{},[39,999,1000],{},"ToneX"," (from IK Multimedia) and the ",[39,1003,1004],{},"Kemper Profiler"," are commercial products you pay for. They bring their own hardware, their own software, their own polish, and their own libraries. People who own them tend to like them, and they're not wrong to. A paid product with a company behind it can offer things a volunteer project can't promise, like a support line and a roadmap.",[10,1007,1008],{},"Pick a fight between them and you'll get 40 forum pages. The useful summary: NAM's edge is free, open, and the size of that shelf. The paid tools compete on everything else.",[29,1010,1012],{"id":1011},"the-one-honest-limit","The one honest limit",[10,1014,1015],{},"Every capture shares one trait, and it's the deal you strike when you use one. Worth understanding before you're surprised by it.",[10,1017,1018,1019,1022],{},"A NAM capture is a recording of one amp at ",[39,1020,1021],{},"one set of knob positions",". Whoever made it set the gain, the bass, the mids, the treble, played the test signal, and froze that exact moment. What you downloaded is that moment.",[10,1024,1025],{},"So when you grab the tone knob inside a NAM player, you're moving a generic EQ the software puts downstream of the capture, not the amp's own control. It'll get brighter or darker, but it moves the sound the way a stereo's tone control does, not the way the amp's own circuit would have if you'd actually reached over and turned it.",[10,1027,1028,1029,1032,1033,1036],{},"That's ",[39,1030,1031],{},"the one-setting ceiling",", and I explained it in more depth in ",[63,1034,1035],{"href":598},"what an amp sim actually is",". It belongs to the capture approach itself, not to NAM. ToneX has it. Kemper has it. Any tool built on capturing a frozen moment has it, by definition.",[10,1038,1039],{},"And for a huge amount of real work, the ceiling does not matter at all. If you found a capture that nails the exact tone you want, it's perfect, it's free, and it'll sound identical every single time you load it. That's a genuinely great trade. A frozen photograph of the perfect tone is worth a lot, and NAM hands you thousands of them for nothing.",[10,1041,1042],{},"The ceiling only starts to pinch when you want to reach over and turn the knobs and hear the amp actually respond, the way it does in the room.",[29,1044,1046],{"id":1045},"where-cathode-fits","Where Cathode fits",[10,1048,1049],{},"I build Cathode, so take this for what it is: the honest version, at the end, where you can ignore it.",[10,1051,1052,1053],{},"Cathode plays amps as live circuits. The circuit runs in real time at whatever knob positions you dial, so when you turn the gain, the whole amp re-responds. ",[39,1054,1055],{},"The knobs are the amp's own.",[10,1057,1058],{},"Cathode exports NAM profiles too, so anything you dial in can be frozen into a .nam file and carried straight into the tools and pedals you already use. Interop over walls.",[10,1060,1061,1062,319],{},"Cathode Player is free. If you want to turn a knob and hear the amp argue back, ",[63,1063,1064],{"href":476},"that's what it's for",[10,1066,1067],{},"And if the tone commons already gives you everything you need, honestly, good. That's thousands of amps for the price of a download, built by people who just wanted to share. Not much in this hobby is that generous.",{"title":527,"searchDepth":528,"depth":528,"links":1069},[1070,1071,1072,1073,1074,1075,1076],{"id":902,"depth":528,"text":903},{"id":919,"depth":528,"text":920},{"id":939,"depth":528,"text":940},{"id":959,"depth":528,"text":960},{"id":982,"depth":528,"text":983},{"id":1011,"depth":528,"text":1012},{"id":1045,"depth":528,"text":1046},"NAM is a free, open-source neural amp capture tool with a huge community tone library. Here's how it works, how you play it, and where it fits, no engineering degree required.",{},"\u002Fblog\u002Fwhat-is-neural-amp-modeler",{"title":888,"description":1077},"blog\u002Fwhat-is-neural-amp-modeler","NVANc9VjeSzaEUvPKPBfQADIrOVYy4b_NgDuaFZTte4",1784842526912]