Playable Guitar Gear Articles are here and They're a Blast!
Alex Kraieski
I might have gotten pretty lucky in terms of timing. When I went to clone TONE3000's open-source NAM player for browsers (to add it to this site) I noticed there was a "play" tab. They implemented live input (as announced in their blog post), making it so you can plug an instrument into your interface and play through their website! And now it's here on my site too!
Even before this feature, I was excited by the possibility of more engaging content by embedding their NAM player in my site, and I've written previously about how T3K's frontend NAM player transforms the experience of sharing digital amp models online. Once I saw how much more interesting articles become when readers can actually play the tones being discussed, I wanted to try something similar here at Tubes & Code.
What experience did I implement here at the Tubes & Code website?
In select articles, you will see a green "playable in NAM" badge at the top. This means there is an "open NAM player" button in the article that will take you to my online NAM player page with a selection of models loaded to let you explore something from the article. For example, in my Archetype John Mayer X review, I've added such a button (technically a link) that opens a link to a playable Dumble sim:
I also added some captures from my preamp to my article about recording DI tones out of an amp's FX loop. This enhances the demonstration of what the preamp-only guitar tone sounds/feels like.
So, why not just embed it directly in the article?
As TONE3000's blog post introducing the player describes, the player uses the SharedArrayBuffer, which has specific security requirements. When I tested sending the required headers sitewide, it broke the fetching of profile pics for the Bluesky-based comments system I use, so I chose to just always put the player on a separate page for now. That community integration is important to me.
If you have any feedback about the experience, please let me know on social media or visit my contact page.
Wrapping up
I think it's a ton of fun to be able to read articles and play related tones at the same time! And from the perspective of a writer with a website, I think it gives me tons of new possibilities. When you're researching gear and recording techniques, you care how it makes you and your music sound.
Being able to read about gear while actually playing related tones is a pretty fun development for guitar websites. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this format more and seeing what kinds of discussions and discoveries come out of it.
Thank you to the TONE3000 team and NAM contributors for making this all possible.
In addition to the articles, you can also access my amp player page here directly with a selection of my full-rig captures loaded by default (along with some of the models that are included in the open-source project).
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