Open formats
Bring your own amps and cabs
RigShed ships with its own amp and cabinet, and neither of them locks you in. Load a NAM capture of a real amp, load an impulse response of a real cab, and the rig becomes yours rather than ours.
Amp captures
What a NAM capture is
A NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) capture is a profile of a real amplifier, trained from a recording of that amp. Thousands are freely shared online. RigShed loads them from Files or iCloud Drive.
When a capture is loaded, the amp panel changes to that amp's face and gives you Level and Mix — and nothing else. That isn't us holding back controls: a capture is a fixed snapshot of an amp at one setting, so there is genuinely nothing else to turn.
- Load any
.namfile from Files or iCloud Drive - The capture's name appears on the amp panel once loaded
- Captures are stored on your device and shared between the app and the AUv3 plug-in
The built-in amp
You often won't need one
The built-in amp is not a capture. It's our own analytic circuit model of a blackface-style valve combo, fitted numerically against a measured reference rather than dialled in by ear — and because it's a circuit model rather than a neural network, it costs about 0.10% of one CPU core. That's roughly 30× cheaper than running a capture.
It also has six working controls instead of two. Captures are there for when you want a specific amp; the built-in one is there for when you want to turn knobs.
Cab impulse responses
An IR replaces the speaker, it doesn't stack on it
Load your own cab impulse response and it takes the place of the amp's own 12-inch speaker. This matters more than it sounds: stacking a cab IR on top of an existing modelled cab gives you two cabs in series, which is why that combination usually sounds wrong. RigShed doesn't let it happen by accident.
- The cab badge always names whichever speaker is actually in circuit
- Amp-only captures need a cab — a capture taken without one has no speaker of its own
Presets
A preset remembers the whole rig
Saved rigs capture every parameter in the chain plus the loaded
capture and cab IR. Load a preset and you get the whole thing back, not
just the pedal settings. Presets export and import as
.rigshed files, so a rig can be shared whole.
What's free
Captures and IRs are free, and uncapped
Load as many amp captures and cab impulse responses as you like, on the free tier. Neither is capped and neither is a paid feature — limiting the captures you have made or downloaded would be a limit on the tone engine, and the tone engine is free.
Your captures, our amp, same board
The whole tone engine is free, and so is every capture you load into it.
Join the TestFlight beta — link pending