Three amps run at once. Each one has its own cab, its own two mics, and its own channel strip.
A guitar amp and effects plugin for macOS. Every picture on this page is a screenshot of it running. It isn't finished: the sound is still being voiced by ear. The page below says which parts are which.
There's no channel switch and no solo button. The three amps always blend. That's the point: you build one sound out of three heads, the way you would if you had them in a room and a hand on the faders.
Six voicings to choose from: American Clean, American Combo, American Drive, Modern Crunch, Vintage Tweed, Boutique Chime. Any of them in any slot. Run three of the same one if that's what the song wants.
Its own cab. Eight configurations, 1×10 up to 2×15, open or closed back.
Its own two mics. Eleven models across dynamics, condensers and ribbons, each with position, distance, level, pan and phase.
Its own channel strip. Six-band EQ and a compressor, with Clean, FET and Opto models.
Its own tremolo and spring reverb, sitting before the cab so the wobble gets miked the way it would on a real amp.
Its own send into the room all three share.
Three amps, two mics each. Six microphones open at once.
There's no pan knob on the amps. The mic pans place them, because that's the control that does the job.
Two rooms inside Free River Studios, a working studio in a former school building in Livingston, Montana: the auditorium and the stairwell. They're the reason the plugin has the shape it has, and they're the two rooms it's named for.
The big one. Long, lush and enveloping, with the pre-delay range to put real distance behind the amp. It's the sound of air in a large wooden room, and it's what the plugin loads by default.
Small, bright and comby: drums at the bottom of the stairs. It's the only room with 6 dB of drive on the tail and a compressor of its own on the wet return, which is what makes it snap back at you instead of decaying politely.
Both rooms are algorithmic today. Neither one has been captured.
What ships right now is a feedback-delay-network reverb per room, voiced by ear against the memory of the place. It sounds good. It isn't the room. Inside the plugin the convolution path is already wired up and sitting empty, waiting on the measurement.
When the auditorium and the stairwell get measured, each room swaps to an impulse response of the actual space. In the code that's a one-line change, because it was built for it from the start. You'll hear the difference, and this page will say the day it happens.
Jamey Warren spent 25 years in pro audio, first as Grace Design's first employee and later as HeadRoom's CEO. Then he built Free River Studios in an old school building in Livingston, Montana. Sanctuary and Old School are its auditorium and its stairwell: real rooms with real doors, a short walk apart. Getting them into a plugin honestly is the long part of the job, and it's the part still in front of him.
Six pages, laid out in the order the signal travels. The order is fixed, because that's the order it happens in.
Six on the board: Transpose, Boost, Envelope Filter, Overdrive, Distortion, Delay. The overdrive runs Transparent, Warm or Bright. The distortion does Crunch, Punch or Fuzz. The delay is Analog, Tape or Digital. Mono, out in front, like a board on the floor.
The three heads and their tone stacks, plus the tremolo and spring tank each one carries. Six voicings, any slot, always blending.
A cab per amp and two mics on it. Where you put them is most of the sound, so this page is mostly a big speaker and two things to drag around on it.
A channel strip per amp. Six-band EQ, and a compressor with an advanced panel when you want the threshold, ratio, attack and release rather than one knob.
All three amps send into one shared tracking room, then the sum hits a glue compressor and a tape stage. The room it opens on is named for Free River Studios itself, and like the rest of them it's voiced rather than captured. This is the page that stops it sounding like three separate plugins.
Stereo delay, tape or digital, free or locked to the host, with ping-pong if you want it. Then the rooms, and a doubler. Sanctuary and Old School live here.
A chromatic tuner that can mute the output while you use it. A metronome. Tap tempo, and sync to your host's clock. MIDI learn, so a foot controller can work the knobs and change presets. Save your own presets and star the ones you keep coming back to. Drag the corner to resize the whole thing, or run it full screen.
The plugin builds, loads, passes Apple's validation and holds up under a render harness. Every page in the screenshots above is finished and wired to real DSP.
What's left is the slow part: sitting with a guitar and voicing it by ear, one stage at a time, until the defaults are worth trusting. Three reverbs currently default to on at once, which is exactly the kind of thing that pass is for.
AU · VST3 · STANDALONE
MACOS 11+ · APPLE SILICON AND INTEL
NO PRICE AND NO DATE YET
Notes from the bench when there's something worth saying: what got built, what got measured, what turned out to be wrong. And the week the rooms finally get captured.
Or read the lab notes at warrenlabs.com →