I Captured My Childhood Amp with NAM so I Could Throw it Away

It's not that I sounded good playing my Stratocaster through a Fender Frontman 15R in my parents' basement growing up, but I do think it would be fascinating to have an impulse response (IR) to capture that "in-the-room sound" as a slice of my life.

Tone is about a moment in time as much as it is a sound. In order to make that sound, your fingers needed to work in a particular way and you needed to own particular gear and be in a particular place. You can't freeze your fingers in time, but stuff like IRs and .nam files (from Neural Amp Modeler) can let you "freeze" parts of your signal chain and acoustics in time.

For capturing room acoustics along with a cabinet, it's pretty clear (from sources such as this TONE3000 guide) that impulse responses really are the correct tool for the job. After all, NAM itself currently can't model reverb. But I've also been intrigued by the idea that a "room mic" does something when capturing gear for NAM. And that's not for no reason; popular capture packs on TONE 3000 like this Fender use a room mic (you can hear it for yourself).

I'm currently preparing to move out of my home here in rural New Hampshire. It's going to be an exciting new chapter for me, but it also makes very aware of how finite my time is here (and really anywhere in the scheme of things). And I don't want to take a bunch of junk with me when I leave.

Therefore, I decided to do get some captures done for NAM since I can't take everything with me. I definitely can't take my humble office/studio space with me. My Fender Frontman 15R is now dead, but it lives on as a digital ghost of sorts.

The models

Pretty soon after I started searching for a new place to live, I got the feeling that "hey, if I'm trying to move to a city, my days of being able to just crank my Marshall in my office without having to worry too much about bothering anyone are probably numbered." And I became obsessed with the idea of capturing my Marshall DSL5CR combo in that room with a "room mic" condenser placed back a few feet. If gear is data, as I have previously written here, then I don't want to squander a finite opportunity to capture that data.

I impulsively added the affordable Lewitt LCT 240 to a Sweetwater order last Black Friday, and it seemed like the right tool for the job here. I got more of the effect I was looking for by placing the mic off-axis, yielding an interesting (in my opinion) clean model.

As moving became more concrete, my attention turned to preparing to let go of belongings I no longer needed, like my old Fender Frontman. To capture this, I used my Sennheiser e609 Silver (another affordable mic which I demoed some positioning stuff with here). I captured the distortion channel with gain at 7, but I got "inconsistent tone errors" on every attempt at training NAM on recording of the clean channel. Oh well.

Open the browser player with this article's captures already loaded so you can plug in and compare the tones with your own playing.

Try These Tones in NAM Player Download NAM Models

You can also check out the full packs on TONE3000 for more information, ESR, and any additional models variations (if applicable):

Of course, the point was never to get "famous" on TONE3000 or anything, but preservation for the sake of my curiosity.

A happy ending for an amp?

If you'll humor me for anthropomorphizing an amp for a second, I'd like to think I gave my old Fender combo a pretty good "life." And I'd like to think that my younger self would have found all of this pretty cool. I spent a lot of time growing up learning to play a bunch of Metallica songs, but it was never a given that the amp I used back then would survive long enough for me to get back into guitar, buy my first bass, and break in the bass by playing "For Whom the Bell Tolls" on the amp. I think that almost surely accelerated its decline, but it was a bucket list item for both me and the amp!

But at the end of the day, things are things, and stuff is stuff. It's healthy to throw stuff away and not keep a bunch of crap you don't need. Memories though, are precious. Just like photographs help us preserve visual memories, modeling tech like NAM can preserve musical and tonal memories for guitarists to keep coming back to throughout their life. A lot of the marketing for modeling focuses on preservation of high-end gear, but preserving the nuances of flawed personal gear has a lot of value too.

Perhaps it is great timing that this lines up so perfectly with the recent, impressive launch of NAM A2. Sure, you could do this with a proprietary modeling technology, but NAM is better suited for the best long-term version of this because of how you can keep retraining models as the technology advances. I'm not trapped by today's technology or a corporate platform.

I will take a lot from New Hampshire as person and musician, such as my Wisteria Overdrive from local pedal maker Deciduous Devices and inspiration from how NH's Hutchinson Family Singers leaned into abolitionist activism as a part of becoming one of the biggest commercial music success stories of the 19th century. My old Fender Frontman combo amp won't join them. My first amp is dead and sits in a dump. My current office and studio space is imminently dying. But at least they live on in this article, in my DAW, and in my practice amp.