What's next — NAM 9000

Being built now · the cab section

SPEAKER DRIVE — a cab that reacts to how hard you play

An impulse response is a perfect photograph of a speaker. But a real speaker moves: when the amp pushes it, the cone travels, the suspension stiffens and the voice coil heats up. SPEAKER DRIVE puts that movement back, between the amp and your cab IR, right where the speaker sits.

Because it runs before the IR, everything it adds is shaped by your cab, just like a real speaker's breakup. Nothing fizzy gets added on top.

DRIVE 44 % SAG 54 %

100 W: stiff with big headroom, and it barely sags. Our pick for tight, palm-muted metal.

The same controls as in the plugin. This drawing shows what the speaker model does to the cone. It isn't audio.

Tightens when you dig in

Hit a low note hard and the cone runs out of travel: the low end compresses and breaks up the way a pushed speaker does. Play quietly and nothing changes at all.

Palm mutes move the highs

A busy cone varies the top end for a moment on every chug, the bit of life a mic'd cab has and a frozen IR doesn't. High notes on their own stay clean.

Bloom on held chords

SAG heats the voice coil over a few seconds. Hold a big chord and it settles and blooms, then recovers as soon as you stop, the way a real speaker breathes.

Quiet playing passes through unchanged Nothing added above 8 kHz Off means bit-for-bit off

Three speakers to choose from: 25 W breaks up early and sags the most, 60 W is the tight British rock speaker, and 100 W is stiff and clean with big headroom. It works on any DI profile with any cab IR. It is built and being played right now, and arrives in a future update. No date: it ships when it sounds right.

In beta now · NAM 9000 Pro

Your own plugins, inside the rig

Bring the effects you already own. NAM 9000 now runs your own VST3 plugins, and AU on Mac, as pedals in the chain: a favourite compressor first on the board, a drive plugin before your capture, your go-to reverb at the end. Up to four at a time, each one placed exactly where it makes sense.

The pedalboard with a plugin pedal between two NAM drive pedals and a vibe

A pedal like any other

ADD PEDAL → PLUGIN, pick it from a searchable list of what's on your computer
Drag it between your stomps, or between the effects after the amp
EDIT opens the plugin's own window, and the footswitch turns it on and off
Left, right or both channels, so each of two panned amps can get its own
Shows up on STAGE and in STUDIO with the rest of your rig

Every gold dot is a place a plugin can sit. The spot straight after the cab, before the EQ, is new: it's where speaker-dynamics plugins belong.

The effects page with a reverb plugin pedal placed before the DELAY / REVERB plate

After the amp, too

On the effects page a plugin drops into any gap between the plates and runs in stereo. The row resizes itself to fit, and the built-in delay/reverb can fold away if you'd rather use your own.

The PLUGIN SLOTS panel: four slots with position, side, plugin name and processing cost

You see what it costs

One panel for all four slots shows where each sits, and how much processing time it takes while you play. Any latency a plugin adds is reported to your DAW, so recordings stay in time.

The STAGE view with a plugin pedal and its right-click menu

Saved with your rig

Presets and DAW projects keep each plugin, where it sits and its own settings. Step between presets that share a plugin and there's no reload gap. Missing on another computer? It's flagged, never lost.

Plugin slots are being tested right now by NAM 9000 Pro and Premium owners, on real rigs with real plugins. A plugin that crashes while loading is skipped on the next start, so a saved project always opens. If the beta goes well, it comes to every Pro owner in an update.

Out now in 1.20 · included in Pro

Five heads of our own — out now — and two more on the bench

The five house heads shipped in 1.20 and come with NAM 9000 Pro; free users can audition every channel in the app. Every one got the full treatment: every channel captured across its whole gain range, as the full rig and again as DI for your own cab (Brutal as full rig for now), on its own faceplate with a real channel switch. Two more heads follow, one release at a time — no dates: each goes out when it sounds right.

The five NAM 9000 house heads: Vintage, Wreck, Hot Rod, Modern and Brutal

The house heads carry the NAM 9000 name: our own faceplates, three channels each, labelled I, II and III, from the first touch of grit to the heaviest thing we will put on a shelf.

Vintage — clean to crunch

Cream and walnut, a script badge cut from the wood. Three channels from a glassy, bell-like clean through a round, touch-sensitive edge of breakup to a warm crunch that cleans up when you roll the guitar back.

Out now · included in Pro

Wreck — hot, raw overdrive

A dark frosted-glass front with the valves glowing through it. A loud, open, slightly unruly overdrive that sits right on the edge of falling apart and answers every change in your pick attack — the hand-built boutique kind of drive.

Out now · included in Pro

Hot Rod — British crunch to lead

Chrome trim and a script logo. A hot-rodded British voice: a tight rhythm crunch, a hotter modded channel and a singing, saturated lead — classic rock to 80s metal on one head.

Out now · included in Pro

Modern — modern high gain

Black, gold and a wall of valves. Fast, tight low end, a focused midrange and a lot of gain on tap — built for modern rhythm playing that has to stay clear under heavy distortion.

Out now · included in Pro

Brutal — extreme metal

Ruby glass from top to bottom. The heaviest of the five: saturated, compressed and dense, with a low end that stays tight on down-tuned riffs.

Out now · included in Pro

The Angel Savage and Mark V-style heads in NAM 9000

Two more for the store

Angel Savage — a modern high-gain head that is thick, aggressive and very tight. Two channels on the face: the head straight, and with its CONTOUR voicing for a scooped, more aggressive midrange, both captured across the full gain range
Mark V-style — the three-channel California head: the Green channel’s warm clean-to-crunch, and the Red channel twice — its IIC+ voicing, the tight, singing 80s lead and thrash rhythm sound, and its Extreme voicing, the most saturated of the three

Both are captured, full rig and DI, and being played now. Like every head, each will audition free in the app the day it ships.

Being built now

Your whole collection, in 3D

Every head, cabinet and pedal in NAM 9000 is getting a 3D model you can pick up and look inside. They live in three rooms — an amp room, a cab room and a pedal room — on shelves and floor lanes you can walk around. Pull a piece down onto the workbench, orbit it, take the covers off, or explode it into its parts: sleeve, baffle, speakers, chassis, valves and the board underneath.

The amp room: two walnut shelves of amplifier heads in 3D, with two combos on the floor

The Namzel VH 3 head in 3D, valves glowing behind its expanded-metal front

Built to the real amp

Each model is drawn at the real amp's size, so a little combo stands small next to a 100-watt stack, the way it would on your floor. Real board thickness, wrapped tolex, grille cloth you can see the weave in, valves that glow behind the mesh.

The Brit 800 head in 3D with its gold control panel

The face you already know

The front of every model is the faceplate you play in the plugin — the same knobs, the same labels, the pointers set where the plugin sets them — turned into real knobs, jacks and switches.

The Mystique ODS-100 head in 3D: fawn covering and a crimson diamond lattice

Open it up

Inside mode takes the cabinet off, and an exploded view fans every part out, from the speaker cone to the transformer iron. The circuitry is illustrative — the look is the point.

The Tweed 59 combo in 3D: lacquered tweed and an oxblood grille

Combos and heads

Combos stand on the amp room floor, heads on the shelves. The Tweed '59 comes both ways: as the real 4×10 combo, and as a head laid out exactly like its faceplate in the plugin.

The Lemon 4x12 cabinet in 3D: orange basketweave and a picture-frame front

Every cab in the library

All twenty-eight cabinet shapes the plugin draws for its IRs, from a 4×12 slant to a tweed 1×8, each rebuilt against the real cabinet it stands for — and the plugin's own cab pictures are being redrawn to match them.

The Pig 1x4 portable amp in 3D: a brown clamshell case with a snout-shaped knob

Down to the smallest

Even the little battery portable behind the Pig IR gets its clamshell case, chrome corners and snout knob.

The cab room: twenty-eight cabinets on shelves and a floor lane

It is a preview of something we are building, not a feature in the plugin yet — no date, and no promise of where it ends up. We wanted you to see it.

The house process

Built on a capture chain we don't publish

Getting a whole gain control into one profile is not a matter of capturing an amp a few times and interpolating. It took us the better part of a year to develop a specialised, multi-stage capture and analysis chain — bench instrumentation, custom tooling, and a lot of amps — and that chain is the part of NAM 9000 we keep to ourselves. What we will happily show you is what comes out the other end.

Indistinguishable from the amp

Every sweep is checked back against the real head it came from, at every position on the knob. The tolerance we hold is a fraction of a decibel across the audible range — the kind of match you normally measure, not hear.

Continuous, not stepped

The knob is smooth end to end: no dead zone where nothing happens, no cliff where a small move changes everything, no hollowing out between positions. It behaves the way the amp's own control behaves, because that is what it was built from.

Every set earns its place

A sweep only ships once it passes the bench, and then a mix engineer's ears. Sets that don't survive both get recaptured — several have. That is why the catalogue grows amp by amp rather than a hundred at a time.

Coming to the pedalboard

Distortion is next

Twenty drive and fuzz pedals now live on the board, each one captured across its whole range, so the knob crossfades between real measurements instead of filtering one. 1.17 added the fuzz row; 1.19 added two free pedals, the NAM-7 EQ and the NAM LOOPER, and rebuilt the comp and the phaser from their original circuits — details on What’s new.

A distortion row — captured, now being tested against the same bench every pedal has to pass

A pedal only ships once every capture across its knob passes the bench, and then somebody has played it for a while. Some sets get recaptured before they make it — that is why the shelf fills a row at a time.

What's on the bench

SPEAKER DRIVE — a cab that reacts to how hard you play

Tightens when you dig in

Palm mutes move the highs

Bloom on held chords

Your own plugins, inside the rig

A pedal like any other

After the amp, too

You see what it costs

Saved with your rig

Five heads of our own — out now — and two more on the bench

Vintage — clean to crunch

Wreck — hot, raw overdrive

Hot Rod — British crunch to lead

Modern — modern high gain

Brutal — extreme metal

Two more for the store

Your whole collection, in 3D

Built to the real amp

The face you already know

Open it up

Combos and heads

Every cab in the library

Down to the smallest

Built on a capture chain we don't publish

Indistinguishable from the amp

Continuous, not stepped

Every set earns its place

Distortion is next

Start with what's already shipped.