Neural Amp Modeler, or NAM, is a free program that copies real guitar amps and pedals. Someone records a real amp, a neural network learns exactly how it responds, and you play your guitar through that copy on your computer. You pay nothing for the program or for the tones.
NAM isn’t the only free way to get an amp sound out of a computer. My list of free guitar amp simulators covers 19 of them. But NAM is the one guitarists keep talking about, because every tone is learned from recordings of a real piece of gear instead of being designed from a circuit diagram.
It started as a side project. Steven Atkinson posted his first test in January 2019, trying to model his own amps for fun, and he made the code open source. TONE3000, the site where people share their captures, now says it holds more than 750,000 of them.
This guide takes you from nothing to a working tone: which free player to download, how to set it up so it doesn’t lag, where the good captures are, and when you need a cabinet file. If your guitar isn’t connected to your computer yet, read how to play electric guitar through a PC or laptop first, then come back.
Step 1: Pick A Free NAM Player
There are two free players, and they don’t load the same files. That’s the first thing that trips people up.
Gateway is the official player from Steven Atkinson, on the NAM website. It loads one capture file and one cabinet file per copy, and it comes as a VST3 plugin, an Audio Unit on the Mac and a standalone app. It needs Windows 10 or later, or macOS 10.15 or later.
The TONE3000 Plugin came out on 1 September 2026, also free. The whole TONE3000 library sits inside it, so you browse and play tones without downloading or unzipping anything. You can chain amps, pedals and cabinets, and it has a tuner. The catch: it only plays the new A2 captures, and you need a free TONE3000 account to load tones from the library.
| Gateway | TONE3000 Plugin | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Steven Atkinson | TONE3000 |
| Price | Free | Free |
| Tone library inside | No, you load files | Yes, with a free account |
| Plays A2 captures | Yes | Yes |
| Plays older A1 captures | Yes | No |
| Pro Tools (AAX) | No | Yes |
| Cabinet IR | One slot | As many IR blocks as you add |
| Presets | Saved in your DAW project | One file that includes the models |
If you’re starting from scratch, I’d install the TONE3000 Plugin. It’s the shortest path from download to sound. Keep Gateway for older A1 files, or if you’d rather not make an account.
One warning. Don’t grab the official plugin from GitHub, even though that’s where its code lives. The newest releases there have no installers, and the last one that does (version 0.7.13, from December 2024) can’t play the new A2 captures. Google Drive also warns that it can’t scan the Mac download for viruses, so make sure you clicked through from the official NAM page and not a copy posted somewhere else.
Step 2: Install It
Gateway for Windows arrives as a zip file. Unzip it first, then run Gateway Installer.exe inside it. On a Mac, open the .dmg and run the installer, keeping VST3, Audio Unit and the standalone app ticked. It runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
The TONE3000 Plugin has a normal installer on each system. On Windows pick Full, or Custom if you only want some formats (Standalone, VST3, AAX, CLAP). On a Mac the .pkg lets you pick the same way, plus AU. On Linux, extract the archive and run install.sh.
Then restart your recording software, or rescan plugins, so it shows up.
What goes wrong:
- The plugin doesn’t appear in your DAW. Rescan plugins or restart it.
- The official plugin crashes before its window opens on a Windows laptop with two graphics chips. Set NAM, or your DAW, to use the dedicated graphics card.
- The TONE3000 window is black on Linux. Install WebKitGTK. On Windows it needs WebView2, which the installer adds on most machines.
The video above was made before the official installer was renamed Gateway, so the file names are different. The steps are the same.
Step 3: Set Up Your Audio So It Doesn’t Lag
Plug your guitar into the instrument input on your audio interface, the one marked Inst or Hi Z. A line input will sound weak and wrong.
In a DAW, put the plugin on an audio track, choose your interface’s input, arm the track and turn on monitoring. In the standalone apps you pick the input and output in the settings instead. In the TONE3000 app that’s Settings, then System Settings, and you also have to switch on Hear Yourself or you’ll hear nothing at all.
Now the settings that decide whether it feels like a real amp:
- Buffer size: 128 samples. Go to 256 if you hear crackles.
- Driver: on Windows, use the ASIO driver for your interface.
- Sample rate: 48 kHz. TONE3000 says its plugin runs lightest there, because other rates make it resample, which costs processing power.
- Headphones: high gain tones feed back through speakers. And skip Bluetooth headphones, which add their own delay.
If you hear two guitars at once, one clean and one through the amp, your interface’s direct monitoring is on. Turn it off.
On an older laptop, the processor is the limit. The TONE3000 Plugin loads every capture in its lighter A2 Lite size by default, and TONE3000 suggests keeping Lite while you practise or record. Gateway does the same thing with its Slim knob: A2 captures load at the smallest size, and you turn Slim up for the full model.
Step 4: Download Captures From TONE3000
Go to the TONE3000 search page, choose NAM, and set the gear type to Amp + Cab to start with. Then sort by Most Downloads (All Time). Popular packs aren’t automatically good, but they’ve been played by thousands of people, and TONE3000 itself admits that uneven quality is a common complaint.
Listen before you download. Every tone page has a preview player, and Live Input lets you play your own guitar through a tone right in the browser.
Then load it:
- Website and Gateway: click Download Tone, unzip the file, then use Select model in Gateway to open a .nam file.
- TONE3000 Plugin: click the plus sign to add a tone, sign in with your free account, and pick one. The Model control switches between the files in a pack.
Why does one amp come as several files? Each capture is a snapshot of the gear at one set of knob settings. A pack with six files is the same amp set six ways.
The packs in the list further down carry TONE3000’s licence: you can use them and publish your recordings royalty free, but you can’t upload the files anywhere else without the creator’s permission.
Two more things. If you picked an Amp Head capture and it sounds thin and harsh, that’s normal; it needs the cabinet file from the next step. And since 25 September 2026, TONE3000 hides packs that break its new sharing rules, such as captures of other plugins, so an old link can stop working.
This official TONE3000 video was made before their plugin existed. The website part still works exactly as shown.
Step 5: Add A Cabinet IR If The Capture Is Amp Only
A real amp head makes no sound on its own. It needs a speaker cabinet, and a lot of the tone comes from that speaker. An IR, short for impulse response, is a small WAV file that does the cabinet’s job.
Check the label on the capture. Amp + Cab already includes the cabinet. Amp Head doesn’t, and TONE3000 even shows an Amp Head Requires Cabinet message when you download one.
- Gateway: click Select IR under the model and load a .wav file. The switch beside it turns the IR on and off.
- TONE3000 Plugin: keep the amp head as the first block, click the plus sign and add a Cabinet IR block after it.
You’ll find free IRs on TONE3000 by switching the format filter from NAM to IR.
The two classic mistakes go in opposite directions. No IR on an amp head gives you a fizzy, thin sound that nobody would call an amp. An IR on an Amp + Cab capture gives you two cabinets, which sounds dull and boxy. And check that the IR switch is actually on before you blame the capture.
If an IR refuses to load in an old copy of the official plugin, update it. Version 0.7.14 added support for some WAV formats that older versions rejected.
Step 6: Set Your Levels
Start at the interface. Set its gain so your hardest strum never lights the clip light. Then shape the rest inside the plugin.
- Input: how hard you hit the amp. Gateway’s goes from minus 20 to plus 20 dB. Too little and a high gain capture sounds weak.
- Noise gate: raise it just until the hiss between notes disappears. Too high and it cuts off the end of every note.
- Bass, Middle, Treble: an EQ after the amp, like the tone controls on a real one.
- Output: Gateway’s output mode is Normalized by default, so different captures play at a similar volume. Leave it there.
There’s also an optional extra called calibration, for the real amp feel. Real amps react to how strongly your guitar hits them, and calibration makes the capture hear your guitar at the right strength. Turn your interface gain all the way down, switch on Calibrate Input (in Gateway it’s behind the gear icon; in the TONE3000 Plugin it’s under Settings, Plugin Settings, Calibration), and type in your interface’s maximum input level in dBu. Your interface manual lists it as the maximum input level at minimum gain; NAM’s own example uses plus 12 dBu for a Focusrite instrument input.
It only changes anything on captures that carry calibration data, and TONE3000 has a Calibrated filter to find those. If you set it up with the gain turned up, the numbers are wrong and so is the result.
Step 7: Save Your Sound
This is where the two players differ again.
Gateway doesn’t store the capture inside your project. It stores where the file lives on your computer. Move or rename your captures folder and every old project opens with a failed model. So pick one permanent folder for your .nam and IR files before you build anything you care about.
The TONE3000 Plugin saves the whole rig as one .t3kpreset file with the models inside it. Copy it to another computer and it loads even offline. Its factory presets are read only, so save your own copy before changing one. On Windows, check that the file name didn’t turn into .t3kpreset.txt when you saved it.
Step 8: Capture Your Own Amp (Optional)
Once you’ve played with other people’s amps, you might want yours in there. TONE3000 trains the model for free on its own computers in the cloud, so you don’t install anything or need a powerful graphics card.
The sweep method gives the cleanest result:
- On TONE3000, choose Create Tone, then Capture, and download the sweep file.
- Play that file from your interface’s output through a reamp box into your amp or pedal.
- Record what comes out: through a load box or DI output for an amp head, straight from a pedal, or with a microphone in front of an amp and speaker. Keep the peaks around minus 8 dB.
- Export a mono, 24 bit, 48 kHz WAV that is exactly the same length as the sweep file.
- Upload it and wait. Training takes about 5 to 20 minutes.
No reamp box? Use the dry and wet method. Split your guitar into two interface inputs, one clean and one through the gear, and play two or three minutes of varied stuff.
TONE3000 gives every capture an accuracy score called ESR, where lower is better. Under 0.01 is great, up to 0.035 is not bad, and anything above 0.3 means something went wrong, usually clipping, hum or noise. If you’re miking the amp, my guide on how to mic a guitar amp covers where to put the microphone.
Remember that each capture is one set of knob settings, so capture a few. And if you want to share them publicly, TONE3000 now only accepts real gear, one piece of gear or one signal chain per pack.
10 Free Captures To Start With
These are ten of the most downloaded captures on TONE3000, checked on 29 September 2026. I took them from the top of the all time download chart and skipped two popular packs that mix amp only and miked files, because they’re confusing on day one. Pedal captures go in front of an amp capture: add a block before it in the TONE3000 Plugin, or run a second copy of Gateway before the first.
| Capture | What it is | Good for | Cabinet | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fender Super Reverb 1977 | 1977 Super Reverb combo, miked | Big cleans, pedals | Included | 170,830 |
| Full Rig Peavey 5150 + Mesa 4×12 | 5150 red channel into a Mesa 4×12 | Metal, palm muting | Included | 105,795 |
| Deluxe Reverb ’65 Reissue Clean | Fender Deluxe Reverb reissue | Classic Fender clean | Included | 89,674 |
| Mesa Boogie Badlander | Badlander 100W, 111 files | High gain, djent, cleans | Add an IR | 73,146 |
| Roland JC 120B Jazz Chorus | JC-120, normal channel | Bright solid state clean | Included | 68,068 |
| Marshall JCM 800 2203 | JCM800 through a load box | Rock and punk crunch | Add an IR | 59,084 |
| Marshall JMP-50 Lead 1969 Plexi | 1969 Plexi into a Marshall 4×12 | Seventies rock | Included | 49,883 |
| VOX AC30/4 1961 Fawn | 1961 AC30, EF86 channel | Vintage chime | Included | 37,755 |
| Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer | TS9 overdrive pedal | Boost in front of an amp | Pedal | 37,596 |
| ProCo Rat | RAT distortion pedal | Crunch and distortion | Pedal | 20,166 |
Download counts change every day, so treat them as a rough guide to what’s popular. Five of these have a demo from the person who made the capture, so you can hear them first.
Peavey 5150 Full Rig (Metal)
The 5150’s red channel into a Mesa 4×12 with Vintage 30 speakers, one of the best known metal rigs there is. Some of the five files are boosted with an MXR Wylde overdrive or a Maxon OD808, the old trick for a tighter low end.
The creator describes it as slightly EQ’d for palm muting, which is exactly what you want if you play in drop C# or lower. The cabinet is included, so there’s no IR to add.
Fender Deluxe Reverb ’65 Reissue (Clean)
Fender’s small combo, and the amp a lot of players reach for when they want a clean tone. The pack has six files, miked with an SM57 and a Royer R-121, plus versions with room sound.
It’s the one I’d load first if you play blues, country or indie, or if you want a clean platform for your pedals.
Mesa Boogie Badlander (High Gain)
A huge pack from the creator known as 2dor: 111 files covering the full amp, the preamp alone and the power amp alone, all calibrated. It covers everything from clean to djent.
Start with the files labelled AMP. The creator says the AMP and POW files need a cabinet IR, so this is the one pack in the top ten where step 5 matters.
Marshall 1969 Plexi (Seventies Rock)
A 1969 Marshall JMP-50 Lead into a Marshall 4×12 with Celestion G12H speakers, miked three ways. The creator’s own description promises it will easily bring you to 70s rock land, and for once that isn’t an exaggeration.
The video is nearly an hour long and also covers the creator’s paid packs. The free NAM capture is a single full rig file.
Vox AC30 1961 (Chime)
A 1961 AC30/4 on its EF86 channel, into a Vox 2×12 with Celestion Alnico Silver speakers. Think early Beatles jangle and chiming chords rather than distortion.
Like the Plexi video, this one is long and shows the creator’s other versions too. The free file on TONE3000 includes the cabinet.
Common Questions
Is Neural Amp Modeler Really Free?
Yes. Gateway is a free download under a personal licence from Steven Atkinson, and the NAM code itself is open source under the MIT licence. The TONE3000 Plugin is free and open source too. Browsing, downloading and capturing on TONE3000 costs nothing. Some creators sell premium packs, but you never need them.
Can I Use NAM Without A DAW?
Yes. Both players have a standalone app. The NAM project’s own notes say Gateway’s standalone audio settings are basic, so if you need anything complicated, run it as a plugin inside a DAW. There are free ones in my list of DAWs for guitar.
Does NAM Work In Pro Tools?
Not the official plugin, which has no AAX version. The TONE3000 Plugin does come in AAX, so that’s the one to install for Pro Tools.
Will My Old A1 Captures Still Work?
In the official plugin, yes. NAM’s site says the old files keep working. The TONE3000 Plugin can’t load them. TONE3000 retrained most of its library for A2, and if you need an A1 file you can still get it with the A1 Legacy filter.
Can I Use NAM On Stage?
Yes, with the right hardware. HeadRush says its Prime, Core and Flex Prime units play NAM captures natively, including A2, and connect to the TONE3000 library. The Darkglass Anagram does the same for bass. Some other pedals convert NAM files into their own format instead, and TONE3000’s view is that converted files are not real NAM models.
Is NAM Better Than Neural DSP Or ToneX?
TONE3000 ran a blind listening test in March 2026 with more than 1,000 listeners and reports that NAM A2 beat Neural DSP’s V2 captures, IK Multimedia’s ToneX V2 and Line 6 Proxy. That’s TONE3000’s own test, although it published the code and raw data. Whatever you make of it, NAM costs nothing, so the fairest test is your own guitar and your own ears.
Does NAM Work For Bass?
Yes. TONE3000 builds its plugin for guitar and bass, and an Ampeg SVT capture sits among the most downloaded tones on the site.
Conclusion
Neural Amp Modeler takes a little more setting up than a normal amp simulator. You pick a player, fetch the tones and sometimes add a cabinet. But once it works, you’re playing through recordings of real amps that would cost thousands to own, and none of it costs a thing.
If NAM feels like too much fiddling, the free amp simulators list has simpler options, and my free guitar VST plugins list has pedals and effects to put in front of it.
Good luck and keep on rockin’!
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