Tone3000 has been quietly revolutionising how guitarists find their sound. It hosts the world’s largest community of NAM A2 captures and IRs, all community created, built on open-source Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) tech.
Players can take their analogue device – be it an tube amp, overdrive pedal, fuzz or whatever – create a capture of it and share it digitally for anyone in the Tone3000 community to use.
And it is bringing this tech to a number of leading brand’s hardware devices, too, with the likes of Blackstar and HeadRush offering Tone3000 native support. Even in the digital era where the amp modellers have ushered in a great abundance for players, this is a paradigmatic shift in how we search for tone.
Now, Tone3000 has made access to its vast library of NAM A2 captures available in a free and open-source guitar plugin that can be run inside your DAW or as a standalone app.
It makes the Tone3000 ecosystem a lot more user friendly, with a Chains feature that allows you to put together a full signal path from user-created NAM A2 captures and IRs. For example, you could take a capture of a slightly pushed Marshall JCM800, stick a capture of an EP-3 boost pedal in front, then – what the heck, right? – lets stick a Keeley Mk3 Driver on there too, more heat more crunch, then with an IR of your choice.
Chains lets you go further, stacking unlimited NAM A2 captures. You can also create these sounds in stereo, run two chains simultaneously and pan one left and the other right. The Spread control allows you to widen a mono signal without splitting it into stereo and there is a handy EQ section that applies global EQ to your entire chain and offers pre and post parametric EQ to your individual blocks.
There are also a plethora of advanced controls – “oversampling, MIDI mapping, per-block normalisation” – to make using these NAM A2 captures a lot easier.
And that’s really the point. The Tone3000 is designed to simplify your workflow. There’s no need for a third-party NAM player.
Everything from the Tone3000 library is available within the plugin from the moment it was created, and it’s there you can manage your favourites, organise them and integrate them with the rest of your in-the-box setup.
"Because the TONE3000 Plugin is open source, right now is the worst it will ever be,” says Stanley Vergilis, the co-founder and CEO of TONE3000. “We’re excited to see what the community does with it.”
For more information, head over to Tone3000.
