AvailableEffect

Amp Rig

Tube-style drive into a real cabinet.

@maru shared this effect so you can play it in your DAW, remix it or put it on your site.

What it does

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.

Guide and controls

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

Drive, tone, and bounded feedback delay.

Prototype

OSC Mini

A compact subtractive synth for learning the signal path.

Building block

Crush

Bit reduction and sample-rate reduction for digital grit.