NAM is overrated. Change my mind. 😏

I’m not saying NAM sounds bad. Far from it.

A great NAM capture can sound amazing. So can TONEX. So can Fractal, Neural DSP, Boss, Line 6, Kemper and many others.

What I don’t understand is the obsession.

A capture is still a snapshot of an amp at specific settings. If I want less gain, different mids, a different master setting or a different interaction between the controls, I often need another capture.

Meanwhile, traditional amp modeling already gives me full control over the amp.

And we’ve been here before.

First it was IRs. Everyone needed thousands of IRs.

Now it’s NAM. Thousands of captures, many of them free.

But having thousands of captures doesn’t automatically give you great tone.

The real value is knowing what to choose, how to combine it, how to EQ it, how to use the right cab, effects and gain structure — and how to turn all of that into the sound you actually want.

AI will probably make captures fully adjustable very soon.

But then I have to ask…

If a capture becomes fully adjustable like a real amp, haven’t we just reinvented amp modeling? 😂

And even then:

Will it actually sound better than what we already have?

That’s the part I’m not convinced about.