The board
38 pedals, and every one is its own circuit
Each pedal is a distinct DSP voicing rather than a preset on a shared effect, and each has its own photographic enclosure. Five noise gates, five compressors, a bass octave, six drives, five equalisers, six modulations, five delays and five reverbs.
- Five genuinely different equalisers — 7-band and 10-band graphics, one- and two-band parametrics, and a clean boost with no filters at all
- Delays with tap tempo and BPM sync, in note divisions
- Every control on screen drives real DSP. There are no decorative knobs
The amp
Tuned by measurement, not by ear
The clean amp is our own analytic circuit model of a blackface-style valve combo into a 12-inch open-back cabinet — not a neural capture and not a sample. Its parameters were fitted numerically against a stepped-sine and third-octave reference over roughly 2,600 optimisation passes.
- Presence sits before the nonlinearity, so hard playing drives the top end into compression harder than the mids
- Power-amp sag: the rail droops under sustained load, so a hard-strummed chord compresses rather than just getting louder
- Costs 0.10% of one core — roughly 30× cheaper than running a neural capture
- A bass voicing the octave pedal switches into automatically, flat from 41 Hz to 1 kHz
The second amp
Foundry, for when one gain stage is not enough
RigShed’s second amp, and not the clean one with the gain turned up: four cascaded gain stages each saturating gently into a sealed 4×12, where the clean amp drives a 12-inch open-back. A single clipping stage always trades saturation for mush. A cascade gets both.
- Measured on a power chord: 4.4 dB more upper-harmonic content than the clean amp driven by the hottest distortion pedal flat out, for 1.5 dB more intermodulation
- Within 3.9 dB of a closed-back target from 60 Hz to 8 kHz, and level-matched to the clean amp so switching compares tone rather than loudness
- Seven knobs, not six — Depth is power-amp feedback at the bottom end, the chest thump, and the clean amp has no equivalent
- Saturation runs at 4× oversampling, so what you hear is harmonics of the note rather than fold-back
The signal path
A real chain, in an order you can change
Input, noise gate, compressor, bass octave, drive, amp, cabinet, EQ, modulation, delay, reverb, looper, limiter, out — and that is only the default. The engine walks a chain you can reorder, because where a box sits changes what the next one hears.
- A drive pushing an amp is a different sound from a drive chewing on the amp’s output. Measured at 74.5% of reference level between the two
- The amp is an anchor, not an effect: it is where the signal splits, so every valid order contains it exactly once
- The tone stack sits before the valve stage and presence after it, which is where they sit on the real circuit — so turning the bass up genuinely drives the amp harder
Looper and tuner
Five tracks, each with its own tone
A five-track looper up to 90 seconds, where every track holds its own rig — record a rhythm part through the clean amp and play a lead over it through Foundry. Alongside it, a chromatic tuner with a wide tuning library, driven from the guitar input or the device microphone.
- Overdub, undo and redo, tap tempo, quantise, count-in, half speed, reverse
- Auto-record starts when you play
- Eighteen tunings across 6- and 7-string guitar and 4- and 5-string bass, from standard through DADGAD to Drop A
- The tuner listens before the amp stage, so your pedals and gain settings never affect the reading
Learn
A course that rewires your rig while it teaches you
Ten lessons on how a rig actually works, taught with RigShed’s own boxes. Each lesson changes your rig so you can hear the difference rather than read about it — lesson five moves the drive to the far side of the amp and lets you play through both orders back to back.
- Lessons one to five are free
- Alongside it, eight playing grades scored by the pitch detector — from one scale shape in one position up to joining the boxes across the neck
- No jargon is used before it has been explained in plain words
