Play Guitar in Your Browser with Neural Amp Modeler

Neural Amp Modeler is an open-source project for simulating guitar amps with deep learning, and below is a real, live example of it that lets you play your guitar through your browser. If you have an audio interface, you can plug-in and play through various presets of my amp and pedalboard, and there are also various pre-recorded DIs you can listen to. If you came here from one of my playable articles, there will be a special selection of models to let you explore something from the article. Enjoy!

This isn't just about my gear and site; it's all a part of an ecosystem backed by open-source technology. Neural Amp Modeler itself is open-source, and this player here is forked from TONE3000's own MIT-licensed fork of NAM for browsers. Their site is also an essential community for sharing tones (here's my profile there).

NAM also runs in DAWs (with the plugin), pedals (like this one at $60ish for something starter-tier I've reviewed), and practice amps. I aim to fit into this universe with "playable articles" where players learn with their own fingers and guitars.

I am not affiliated with TONE3000, but I appreciate their contribution to the open-source ecosystem! I want to thank TONE3000 and Steve Atkinson for making this possible.

What you need

  • nothing but a browser to hear demo tracks

  • an audio interface and instrument to play live

  • headphones/speakers

An audio interface lets you plug an instrument cable (and more) into your computer. If you are looking for an entry-level interface to get going playing and recording guitar through your computer, Focusrite's Scarlett series is a common, solid starting point that I've examined here.

Try playable articles

There are a lot of talented people out there demoing and writing about gear online, but their tone isn't yours. And their words about how something feels will never translate exactly to how you will experience it.

I created playable articles here at Tubes & Code to close this gap and put the focus back on your playing. These articles will let you load into this player with sets of NAM models and impulse responses curated to let you explore a topic. For example, you can play with different microphone positions or see what a preamp-only guitar tone sounds and feels like.

Why does open-source matter?

In addition to the practical benefits of the "playable article" experience, I think embedding NAM right here in my website helps demonstrate what an open-source approach brings to the table and why guitarists should care.

There are a lot of proprietary modeling/capture ecosystems out there owned by companies. The engineers at these companies do an impressive job (broadly speaking), but the ecosystems are ultimately designed to protect the company's ability to tell you where you're allowed to take your tone. These boundaries mean that certain types of knowledge about these technologies is restricted to those inside the company.

Imagine a tube amp that's 100% unfixable by amp techs. NAM is the opposite of that. Nothing stops guitarists, developers, and sound engineers from learning more about NAM and building products and content that further grow the ecosystem and collective knowledge.