Neural Amp Modeler, or 'NAM' is a revolutionary software designed to emulate the rich, diverse tones of traditional guitar amplifiers. This means that instead of investing in physical amplifiers and pedals, you can harness the power of digital technology to sculpt your sound directly from your computer.
For beginners navigating the vast world of guitar gear, Neural Amp Modeler acts as a virtual playground, where the possibilities are as limitless as your imagination.
According to the official website of Neural Amp Modeler https://www.neuralampmodeler.com/ NAM is an open-source project that uses deep learning to create models of guitar amplifiers and pedals with state-of-the-art accuracy. And it looks like this ↓
That description has a lot of fancy words and may be a bit confusing for some of us. In short, NAM can do the following tricks for guitar players and music producers.
1. You can use NAM as guitar amps and effect pedals to make your guitar sounds great.
2. NAM can learn your effect pedal and/or amp tones so you can make other people's guitars sound as good as yours.
How does NAM work?
In essence, NAM operates like a traditional guitar amp, with the key difference being that NAM is software-based, whereas guitar amps are physical hardware.
You can connect your guitar to a computer running NAM. After NAM receives your guitar sound, NAM will process your guitar sound. Then NAM outputs the processed (polished) guitar sound through the computer speakers. This is similar to how guitar amplifiers work. (If you're not sure how to connect your guitar to the computer, I'll explain it later in my tutorial)
NAM also has the capacity to learn. It can analyze guitar tones and simulate guitar tones.
For example, you can ask NAM to analyze your guitar tone and create a sound profile. You can then share this NAM sound profile on the Internet. Other NAM users can load your sound profile into their NAM and their guitar tone will sound like yours.
However, this tutorial focuses on using NAM for guitar playing, rather than creating NAM profiles. If you are interested in learning more about creating guitar sound profiles with NAM, please search for Jason Zdora on YouTube. He has a very good video tutorial on this topic.
WHY NAM?
The answer is straightforward. NAM is good and it's free.
But why many people have never heard of it or don't use it? I'll explain this later in this article.
If you are curious about what kind of guitar tones NAM can create, enter the keyword NAM in the YouTube search bar and you will find many positive reviews about it.
Below are some YouTube videos you might be interested in.
Downsides of NAM?
Ease of use for non-technical people is what keeps people from using Neural Amp Modeler. But that's not NAM's fault. 30 years ago, cell phones were considered complicated. 100 years ago, electric light was considered a high-tech product.
Brian Wampler, the founder of Wampler Pedals, described NAM as revolutionary. It's normal that NAM can be a bit overwhelming for beginners.
I did a lot of research and testing when I first started using NAM. It was quite an experience. And it was quite time-consuming, especially when I got stuck. I was really hoping to find more documentation or tutorials, but NAM is still too new. There are not enough tutorial resources on the Internet yet.
That's one of the reasons I'm building this site. I hope I can help anyone who is interested in the Neural Amp Modeler.
So if you are still interested in Neural Amp Modeler, please continue to the next section of this guide.
