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@maru shared this effect so you can build on it and use it in your DAW.

AvailableEffect

Amp Rig

Tube-style drive into a real cabinet.

About

A guitar amp and speaker cabinet in one effect, with a delay and a small room after it. Plug in a guitar, or play the included take, and go from a clean bedroom tone to a doom wall without building a chain.

The idea

Much of what makes an amp sound like an amp is not the distortion but the speaker. A guitar cabinet is a small, resonant loudspeaker in a wooden box, and it throws away the fizzy top end that makes plain distortion sound harsh. Amp Rig puts a cabinet after the drive, and the Cabinet switch is there so you can hear the difference: turn it off and you hear the bare amp.

The signal runs in a fixed order: amp, tone and presence, cabinet, delay, then space. The input is summed to mono, as a guitar is; the cabinet uses slightly different left and right responses, so the output opens up into stereo.

Controls

  • Drive sets how hard the guitar hits the amp. Below about 0.2 it is a clean boost; above about 0.7 the attack of each note sinks into the sustain.
  • Dist Mix blends the driven sound with the clean one. Pull it back to keep pick attack under a saturated tone.
  • Tone is a low-pass after the amp, from 200 Hz to 8 kHz. It is the most useful knob for making a sound sit in a mix.
  • Presence adds up to 12 dB of upper-mid bite.
  • Cabinet switches the cabinet in and out with a short crossfade.
  • IR picks the cabinet: 1x12 Combo, 2x12 Open Back, 4x12 Closed, Small Tweed or Direct, a nearly flat response for when you want the amp without a speaker colour.
  • Mic Position moves the virtual microphone from the centre of the speaker (bright and a little nasal) to its edge (dark and thick).
  • Cab Level sets the cabinet's output level.
  • Time, Feedback and Delay Mix shape the echo, from a short slapback to repeats up to a second apart.
  • Space and Size add a small reverb and set how large it feels.
  • Level sets the final output.

Changing the cabinet or dragging the mic position crossfades smoothly, so you can audition them while playing.

Getting started

Amp Rig is an audio effect: play a recording through it or connect a guitar. It comes with a dry electric guitar take so you can hear it before you plug anything in. Start from a preset: Bedroom Clean, Edge of Breakup, Small Tweed Bark, 4x12 Crunch, Fuzzed Out Fuzz Out, Slapback Country or Doom Cathedral. Then try the same patch through a different cabinet.

Limits

The cabinets are designed responses, not captures of real speakers, and the amp is a single voice rather than a model of a specific vintage amplifier. Loading your own cabinet impulse is not supported yet.

The demo take is "Warmer" by Andy G. Cohen, CC BY, from the OpenMIC dataset (<https://zenodo.org/records/1432913>).

How it works.

Signal order is drive into tone into presence into the cabinet IR into delay into level. The drive stage is a static waveshaper: a fixed nonlinear curve, oversampled so the harmonics it generates fold back in as little as possible rather than aliasing into ugly inharmonic junk. Tone is the same biquad low-pass FX Mini uses, sitting after the distortion where an amp's tone stack sits. Presence is a high shelf just before the speaker.

The cabinet is a partitioned convolution against a recorded impulse response - literally the measured response of a real speaker in a real box with a real microphone in front of it. Convolving your signal with that recording imposes the cabinet's frequency response and time smear onto whatever you play. It's the least clever stage in the chain and by far the most important to the sound. Mic Position crossfades between two captured positions rather than modelling mic movement, so extreme settings are interpolations, not measurements.

The delay sits after the cabinet on purpose, so repeats don't get re-filtered on every pass and turn to mud - which is what happens on real rigs with the pedal in front, and is occasionally what you want. It's a single-tap feedback delay with the feedback capped below unity.

Latency: convolution is partitioned, so the plugin reports its exact block latency to the host and your DAW compensates. The number will be published with the first build rather than guessed at here.

What would you make with Amp Rig?

Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.

Goes well with.

Prototype

FX Mini

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Building block

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