Neural Amp Modeler is fucking awesome.
There. I said it.
I've spent enough time using NAM, capturing real amplifiers, and making NAM profiles for black metal and death metal that I'm completely sold on the technology.
A good Neural Amp Modeler capture can sound absolutely ridiculous.
But NAM also kind of sucks.
Not because of the sound.
Because of the workflow.
The Problem With NAM Profiles
A normal NAM capture is basically a snapshot.
You dial an amp to a particular setting, capture it, and now you have that sound inside a .nam file.
Great.
But what happens when you want less gain?
Load another NAM.
More gain?
Load another NAM.
Different gain structure?
Dig through the folder and load another NAM.
Now imagine somebody captured the same amplifier at five different gain settings.
You might have:
- Low Gain.
- Medium-Low Gain.
- Medium Gain.
- Medium-High Gain.
- High Gain.
That's useful...
But you're still clicking through five different files.
And if you're anything like me, eventually you've got hundreds of NAM captures sitting on your computer.
Some are great.
Some are shit.
Some are named properly.
Some look like somebody fell asleep on their keyboard while naming the file.
Before long, you're spending more time auditioning Neural Amp Modeler profiles than actually writing guitar riffs.
That's the part of NAM I've never particularly loved.
And Then There's Your Input Level...
Here's another thing that catches people out.
Your guitar isn't necessarily hitting every NAM capture at the level it was designed around.
And that matters.
Sometimes somebody loads a NAM profile and immediately thinks:
"This sounds like shit."
Maybe.
Or maybe you're slamming the front of it way harder than the person who created the capture.
Or you're barely tickling it.
Change the input level and suddenly the exact same NAM can respond completely differently.
More saturation.
Less saturation.
More attack.
Less compression.
Sometimes that supposedly terrible capture suddenly sounds fantastic.
This is one of the reasons I've been beating the drum about NAM input calibration and gain staging lately.
NAM is extremely powerful technology.
But there's still some responsibility on the person using it.
Which brings me to something that makes the whole thing a hell of a lot easier.
RITUAL 2 Fixes The Part Of NAM That Annoys Me
Oracle Sound recently released RITUAL 2, a completely free NAM loader for PC and Mac.
And I mean free.
Not "free until you want the useful part."
Not a subscription.
Not a crippled demo.
Free.
It works as a plugin or standalone app and lets you build the entire guitar signal chain in one window:
- Pedal.
- Amp.
- Tone controls.
- Dual cabinet IR loader.
- Gate.
- Tuner.
Done.
You can also use it as a regular Neural Amp Modeler loader and load the .nam captures you already have.
But that's not the really interesting part.
The interesting part is the RIT engine.
Five NAM Captures. One Sweepable Amp.
A RIT Profile takes between two and five NAM captures and combines them into a single .rit file.
Let's say I take one of my real amplifiers and make five captures.
- Capture 1 has the lowest gain.
- Capture 2 has a little more.
- Capture 3 has more again.
- Capture 4 is getting nasty.
- Capture 5 is balls-to-the-wall high gain.
Normally, those would be five separate NAM profiles.
With RIT?
They become one file.
Load the RIT Profile into RITUAL 2 and the big GAIN knob moves smoothly from the first capture through to the last.
That's the bit I love.
Want less gain?
Turn the knob.
Want more gain?
Turn the fucking knob.
What an astonishing technological breakthrough.
We've somehow reinvented the guitar amplifier.
That's Why I Started Making RIT Profiles
Once I understood what RIT could do, the next thought was pretty obvious.
I own the amps.
I know how to dial in high-gain guitar tones.
I already make Neural Amp Modeler captures.
So I spent several days creating my own RIT Profiles specifically for metal guitar.
Every Chernobyl Audio RIT uses five carefully dialed captures taken progressively through the gain range.
I'm not just turning the gain knob randomly and capturing whatever comes out.
The starting guitar tone has to kick ass first.
Then I build five usable stages around it.
I test them with guitars in:
Standard E, Standard D, C# Standard, Standard B, and Drop A.
Because a death metal guitar tone that sounds fantastic in Standard D can turn into complete soup once you throw a Drop A guitar through it.
And a black metal guitar tone needs enough attack and definition that fast tremolo picking doesn't disappear into a cloud of distortion.
Full Rig Or Your Own IR
Every one of my RIT Profiles comes in two versions.
The Full Rig RIT gives you the complete tone.
Load it.
Play.
Done.
The Head Only RIT gives you the captured amplifier without the cabinet baked in, so you can load your own impulse responses directly inside RITUAL 2.
So if you just want a killer high-gain metal guitar tone immediately, use the Full Rig.
If you're somebody who enjoys screwing around with cabinet IRs for three hours because apparently you hate having free time...
Use the Head Only version.
Both are included.
No, RIT Isn't Magic
There's one thing I want to make clear.
A RIT Profile does not magically recreate every possible setting of the original amplifier.
It only knows the captures used to create it.
My RITs contain five captures.
RITUAL 2 gives you a smooth, parametric-like sweep between those five points.
That's it.
But for actually writing and recording guitar?
That's incredibly useful.
I don't need every theoretical position of every knob on an amplifier.
I need a killer tone and enough usable gain range to make it work with different guitars, tunings, riffs, and productions.
That's exactly what these are built to do.
Stop Collecting NAMs. Start Using Them.
This is probably my biggest problem with the whole NAM world.
It's very easy to become a collector.
- Another free capture.
- Another 100-profile download.
- Another folder.
- Another amp.
- Another 600MB of shit you'll probably never load again.
And suddenly you own 4,000 NAM profiles while still using the same three.
My RIT Profiles are basically the opposite philosophy.
One amp.
Five deliberate captures.
One sweepable RIT Profile.
Load it.
Set your gain.
Adjust the tonestack if necessary.
Write music.
That's what I actually want from this technology.
The First Chernobyl Audio RIT Profiles
I've started the collection with six different high-gain amps, each with its own personality.
- IronSphere gives you tight, saturated modern gain with plenty of clarity.
- Barbaric 60 mkI is raw, aggressive, organic, and ridiculously good for black and death metal.
- Barbaric 120 mkI is razor-tight, dry, violent, and built for surgical extreme-metal riffing.
- Barbaric 120 mkII pushes that idea into bigger, heavier, more modern territory.
- Hotwired Crown brings nasty British grind and aggression from a heavily modified high-gain amp.
- Infernal 850 is thick, open, saturated, and less clinically modern than the others.
Every one includes Full Rig and Head Only RIT Profiles.
And every one was built around the same idea:
Stop fucking around with guitar tones and start writing music.
RITUAL 2 Is Free. The RIT Profiles Are $10.
You don't need to buy another amp simulator.
You don't need a subscription.
You don't need some premium version of RITUAL 2 to unlock the RIT engine.
RITUAL 2 is free.
Download it from Oracle Sound.
Install it.
Then grab whichever Chernobyl Audio RIT Profile fits the kind of music you're making.
The introductory price is $10 per RIT Profile.
They'll normally be $15.
If you've already fallen in love with Neural Amp Modeler but you're getting tired of clicking through endless individual captures...
This is exactly why I made these.