Modeler News
Firmware updates, gear announcements, industry trends, and the practical bits that change how a modeler player actually works.
JHS Cut the AT+ Down to $129 by Deleting the One Control That Was Never About Wattage
The AT Mini is the original V1 Andy Timmons circuit locked in 100-watt mode, $129 against the AT+'s $219. The missing toggle was never a wattage control — it was a compression control. Which means the $90 you save is one voicing decision made for you, and if you're running into a modeler it's probably the decision you'd have made anyway.
Marshall Put Hendrix's Name on a 20-Watt Plexi — Which Is the One Wattage Jimi Never Used
The JMH Studio bundle is a Studio Vintage in purple oil-on-water Tolex: 20 watts of EL34, switchable to five, into a 2x12 with Celestion V12s. £1,749.99, shipping September 9. The finish is the news. The wattage is the thing worth arguing about, because the entire Hendrix power-section story happens above where this amp stops.
Friedman's Jose 20 Puts the Arredondo Mod in an EL84 Chassis — and Names the Man Who Made It
Dave Friedman follows the JOSE 100 with a 20-watt EL84 head and 1x12 combo built around a three-position Gain Style switch. $1,799 and $2,099. The interesting part isn't the wattage — it's that a mod nobody was allowed to talk about for forty years now has a nameplate.
Crossroads 2026: Clapton's Blind Faith Tele Returns, Mayer's Silver Sky Goes Incline Blue
Guitar Center's 2026 Exclusive Crossroads Collection landed August 26: a 130-piece Fender Blind Faith Telecaster at $4,999, 70 PRS Silver Skys in Incline Blue at $3,750, and Martins up to $25,000. Proceeds go to Crossroads Centre Antigua. Here's what those two electrics actually sound like — and how to get there without them.
Gibson Revives a Norlin-Era Flop as a 28-Inch Baritone — and Puts Alnico 8 Humbuckers In It
The Victory Baritone runs 28 inches, tunes B to B, and carries two new Gibson ELEV8 humbuckers with Alnico 8 magnets and push/pull inner-or-outer coil selection. $2,499 with a case. Here is the gear history behind the shape, and what an Alnico 8 baritone actually asks of your amp and cab blocks.
Sleep Token's First Signature Instruments Arrive — and the Jackson's 30" Octave-Down Spec Breaks Every Metal Preset You Own
Jackson and Charvel unveiled the Sleep Token IV Monarkh SC ($2,199.99) and III Pro-Mod San Dimas Bass V ($1,599.99). The guitar is a 30-inch-scale EverTune build set up for whole-octave-down tuning — which puts your low string at 41 Hz, the same fundamental as a bass low E. Here is what that does to your high-pass, your gate, and your cab block.
Hotone's Pulze Jr. Puts NAM Loading, AI Presets, and 8 Hours of Battery in a $299 Practice Amp
Hotone's new Pulze Jr. is a 20-watt stereo battery amp with 52 amp models, 10 NAM/Sound Clone slots, 20 user IR slots, AI-generated presets, and a stem splitter — for $299. The NAM slots are the part that actually matters, and the ten-slot ceiling is the part nobody's talking about.
Death By Audio and Rainger FX Put a Real 3-Watt Amp, a 2-Inch Speaker, and a Microphone Inside a Pedal — and the Reason It Works Is the One Thing an IR Physically Cannot Do
The Amp Crash went live August 20 at $395 / £425. Inside the box: a 3-watt amplifier, a 2" speaker, and a mic pointed at it. Every writeup is calling it novelty. It isn't — there's a specific, nameable thing happening in that enclosure that a cab IR is mathematically incapable of reproducing, and it's worth understanding whether you buy the pedal or not. Here's what's actually generating the sound, how close you can get on a Helix or HX Stomp (with the blocks that get you there), and where the approximation stops.
Charvel's New Pro-Mod Plus DK24s Are a Pickup Decision, Not a Finish Decision — Here's Which One Matches Your Amp Block
Charvel expanded the Pro-Mod Plus Dinky DK24 line this week: 24 stainless steel jumbo frets, 12–16 inch compound radius, caramelized maple necks, three bridge options, roughly £999–£1,155 / €1,149–€1,329 (US coverage cites $1,199–$1,399). The finishes are what everyone is posting. The specification that changes your presets is the pickup split — Nazgûl/Sentient on the HH models, Full Shred TB-10 with SSL-6 single-coils on the HSS. Those two sets want different amp blocks and different EQ. Here's the measurement-based way to pick, and where to land the knobs on each.
Walrus Audio's Canvas Expression Has a Selectable-Resistance Output — Which Means It's the First Expression Pedal That Doesn't Care Whose Modeler You Own
Walrus announced the Canvas Expression on August 18: contactless magnetic sensor, no pot to wear out, $299.99, shipping now. The headline features are MIDI and CV. The spec that actually solves a problem is buried in the output section — a TS output with selectable 10k, 25k, and 50k total resistance. Expression pedals are not a single standard, and that mismatch is why your last one felt wrong on a Helix. Here's the taxonomy, which setting matches which device, and how to use the custom taper for worship swells.
Epiphone's Lzzy Hale Explorer Custom Ships With a New High-Output Humbucker — And That's a Gain Staging Problem Nobody Will Warn You About
Epiphone unveiled the limited-edition Lzzy Hale Explorer Custom this week: mahogany body, ebony board, Black Diamond Holographic Sparkle, hardshell case included, €999, mid-September. The spec that matters isn't the finish — it's the new ProBucker Ignite humbuckers. Swap a hotter pickup into a preset dialed for a PAF and your amp model is now clipping at a different point in its transfer curve. Here's the measurement, the correction, and where to land the knobs for a Halestorm-adjacent tone on Helix and Quad Cortex.
JAM Pedals Built a $399 Box to Sound Like a $29 Amp — And the Reason It Works Is Bandwidth, Not Gain
JAM Pedals and Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard announced the Tiny Amp Destroyer this week — €369, three footswitches, two stackable gain stages plus a treble booster, built from a pawnshop mini amp Stu bought for $29. The joke writes itself, and everyone's writing it. Here's the part nobody's covering: the reason a busted 4-inch speaker cuts through a mix isn't distortion, it's a 300 Hz–4 kHz bandwidth window. Build it on a Helix or HX Stomp tonight with an amp model you already own, and here's the notch frequency to sweep for.
Reverend Put Three P-90s in a Semi-Hollow — Then Built It on a 25.5" Scale, Which Quietly Invalidates Most P-90 Overdrive Advice
The Kingbolt Air 390 is $1,599, mahogany with a center block and a solid spruce top, and carries three hum-cancelling Steelhead P-90s wired to seven combinations via a five-way and a push-pull. The three-pickup semi-hollow is a Gibson idea. Reverend built theirs on a Fender scale — and that one number changes where the P-90 bark lands, which drive settings work, and how you have to level-match a preset across seven positions instead of three.
Martin's Two Joe Bonamassa Signatures Chase a $45 Guitar From 1937 — And Only One of Them Is Built to Get Plugged In
Martin announced two Bonamassa signature acoustics today, both modeled on his 1937 00-18 shade-top — a $3,999.99 Nazareth-built recreation with Golden Era scalloped bracing, and a $1,299.99 Navojoa-built 00-10E Retro with Martin E1 electronics. The 00 body and the mahogany are the whole story, and they're also the reason the standard piezo EQ recipe will wreck this guitar. Here's the corrected version for a Helix, HX Stomp or Quad Cortex — plus what that Phase switch is actually for.
John Page Built Noah Kahan's Guitarist a $5,995 Baritone — And If You Copy Our Drop-Tuning Settings Onto One, You'll Ruin It
John Page Guitars unveiled the Noah Levine Signature DL Baritone on August 12 — $5,995, 27-inch scale, P-90s, four heavy-relic finishes Levine picked himself, first batch shipping January 2027. Levine plays lead for Noah Kahan and co-wrote 'Dial Drunk.' But here's the part that matters if you already own a baritone: our own drop-tuning high-pass table is built for metal, and applying it to a clean 27-inch baritone cuts above the fundamental and hollows the instrument out. Scale length is the column that table doesn't have.
MXR Reissued the Rack Dimebag Never Turned Off — And Almost Everyone Chasing That Sound Builds the Wrong Effect
MXR announced the Flanger/Doubler on August 11 — $333 street, all-analog BBD, available now. It's a pedalboard version of the Model 126 rack that Dimebag's tech says lived in the wet loop 100% of the time. But it was parked in Doubler mode, not flanging. If you've been buying flangers to chase the Cowboys from Hell intro, you've been building the wrong block. Here's the correct one on Helix, HX Stomp, and Quad Cortex — plus the Invert switch's mono-cancellation problem, measured.
Epiphone's Marcus King El Dorado Puts Solid Rosewood Under $1,000 — Then Ships It With the One Pickup That Hides It
Epiphone's limited-edition Marcus King signature revives the '70s El Dorado as a square-shoulder dreadnought with a solid spruce top and solid rosewood back and sides, at $999 with a hardshell case. The wood is the story. The L.R. Baggs Element Bronze under-saddle piezo it ships with is the problem — under-saddle pickups sense string pressure, not body resonance, so plugged in you hear almost none of what you paid for. Here's how to get the rosewood back on a Helix, HX Stomp or Quad Cortex.
Harley Benton's Space Wah and Space Volume Land at €39–€49 — And If You're Going Direct, Only One of Them Belongs on Your Board
Thomann just launched three aluminium treadle pedals — Space Wah (€49), Space Volume (€39), and a combined Space Wah/Volume (€49). For anyone running a Helix, HX Stomp or Quad Cortex, the interesting question isn't whether a €49 wah is good. It's that you already own a wah block and a volume block, and buying an analog treadle changes where in the signal path those functions live. That placement change is bigger than the price tag.
Line 6's First Free Plugin Ever Has Five Amps and Zero HX Models — Which Means None of Your Helix Presets Open in It. Here's the Translation Table
Helix Stadium Native shipped August 4 with a permanently free Intro license — the first free plugin in Line 6's history. The coverage is calling it 'every amp and effect at zero cost.' It is five amps, one of which is a bass head, and it contains no HX Legacy models at all. That last part is the whole story: your existing Helix presets don't load, and neither do ours. But four of the five amps map cleanly onto the models our recipes lean on hardest, and one of them is a direct hit on the single most-used model on this entire site.
Harley Benton's Aged Series Puts Nitro, Roasted Maple and Real Relic'ing on a $238 Guitar — 20 Models Deep
Thomann just relic'd its entire vintage lineup — TE-62, ST-62, JA-60 and the basses — in Light Aged and Heavy Aged trims, on caramelised maple necks and US alder bodies, from €249. The relic is cosmetic and I don't care about it. What I care about is the pickup spec buried under the worn paint: vintage-voiced alnico V single-coils, which are the lowest-output thing you can plug into a modeler and the single fastest way to make your factory presets sound wrong. Here's the fix, and the hum problem nobody warns you about when you go direct.
Kramer's Malina Moye Pacer Deluxe Pairs Two Vintage-Output Single-Coils With a Super Distortion — and That Gap Will Wreck Your Presets
Kramer's 50th-anniversary signature for Malina Moye is a Splash Blue Pacer Deluxe with a left-handed version in the lineup and a DiMarzio HSS set: Virtual Vintage Blues, Area 67, and a Super Distortion in the bridge. That last one is the story. You're putting a vintage-output single-coil and one of the hottest humbuckers ever sold on the same five-way switch, with no tone control on the bridge — and if you go direct into a Helix or Quad Cortex, positions 1 and 5 are not going to hit your amp block like the same guitar. Here's how to wire the preset so they do.
Orange's New $249 Baby Terror Is 20 Solid-State Watts With No Cab Sim on the DI — Which Makes It a Modeler Player's Amp, Not a Purist's
The Baby Terror is a 1.5 kg, 20-watt JFET lunchbox head with a three-band EQ, presence, a footswitchable second volume, and a low-end 'Tubby' switch — $249/£199/€229, out today. The spec everyone is skipping is the one that matters most: the balanced XLR out carries no cabinet emulation. That's not an omission, it's an invitation, and it changes who this amp is actually for.
MXR Put a Granular Synth in a Pedal for $269 — Here's What Your Helix Already Does, and the One Mode It Can't Touch
MXR announced the Textures Granular Synth Engine (M310) on July 28 — $269, available now, with three capture modes, eight presets, and true stereo I/O. Delay mode and Auto-Freeze are largely buildable on a Helix, HX Stomp, or Quad Cortex tonight for free. Layers mode — four independently sampled notes with their own fade envelopes — is not. Here's the honest split, with the block-level settings to try first.
Harley Benton's Fusion-T II Puts Stainless Frets, a Babicz Bridge and a Coil-Split Switch Under $500 — Across 18 Models
Thomann's house brand just dropped 18 versions of a T-style with a roasted maple neck, 24 stainless steel frets, Babicz hardware and an 'Alter Switch' that coil-splits the humbuckers — all under $500. The spec sheet is the easy part. The part nobody tells you: that split switch drops your output by a chunk, and if you're going direct into a Helix or HX Stomp, half your presets are about to be wrong. Here's how to set it up so the switch is usable live.
Gretsch Built a $278 Solidbody With Two Ceramic Humbuckers — and It Drives Your Modeler Nothing Like a Gretsch
The new Gretsch Streamliner CVT is a solid mahogany body, a bolt-on neck, and two high-output ceramic humbuckers for $278 — the least Gretsch-sounding Gretsch they've ever made, and it's aimed straight at rock and metal players. Forget the twangy hollowbody you're picturing. Here's what ceramic humbuckers actually do to the front end of your Helix or HX Stomp, and where to set the gain so they don't turn to ice.
Blackstar Shrinks Doug Aldrich's Signature Amp Into a 5-Watt Combo — Here's How to Cop That Whitesnake Lead Tone on a Modeler
The Blackstar DA5 Ruby is a 5-watt (down to 0.5) single-12 combo built around Doug Aldrich's DA100 Ruby head — two channels, four voices, ISF, and a CabRig IR loader with XLR DI, for $849.99. It's a studio-sized version of a big hard-rock amp, which means the tone is a hot-rodded Marshall lead voice. That's a voice every modeler you own already speaks. Here's the amp, and here's the settings recipe.
Epiphone Just Dropped the Guitar Half of the Dookie Rig — a $545 P-90 Junior. Here's How to Voice One Pickup Into Your Modeler
The Epiphone Billie Joe Armstrong Les Paul Junior in Radiant Red is a single-P-90 slab-mahogany punk machine at $545 — one pickup, a volume, a tone, turn it up and go. A day after Marshall's $3,999 Dookie Plexi, here's the other half of Billie Joe's rig at a fourteenth of the price. And here's how a single P-90 actually behaves into a Plexi model, because it drives your modeler differently than the Strat you're used to.
Marshall's First Signature Amp in 14 Years Is Billie Joe's Baby-Blue Dookie Plexi — Here's How to Cop It on a Modeler for $0
The Marshall 1959BJA is a 100-watt handwired Super Lead in baby-blue tolex — a modded Plexi built around the tone Billie Joe Armstrong got on Dookie. It's Marshall's first artist signature amp in 14 years, it's $3,999, and it's a hand-wired single-channel head. It's also, underneath the paint, a Plexi with a hot-rod mod — which every modeler you own can already do. Here's the amp, and here's the settings recipe.
Mooer's Meta FX Is a £149 Stereo Effects Pedal You Reflash — One Reverb, Delay, or Mod Firmware at a Time
Mooer's new Meta FX is a compact stereo effects pedal with a swappable-firmware trick: you flash it to be a reverb, a delay, or a modulation box — 40-plus algorithms per family — but only one family at a time. At £149 it's tempting for ambient players. The catch is exactly that 'one at a time' part, and if you already run a Helix or HX Stomp, you need to know where this actually fits.
Strymon's TimeLine MX Runs Two Delay Machines at Once for $679 — Here's What Your Helix Can and Can't Do About It
Strymon announced the TimeLine MX on July 7 — a $679 successor to the delay that has anchored worship pedalboards for over a decade. It runs any two of twelve machines simultaneously with series, parallel, or split routing and per-engine panning, and adds four new engines: Spectral granular, a per-tap MultiTap, Oil Can, and Drum. The original TimeLine stays in the lineup at $449. If yours lives in a Helix effects loop, here's the honest math.
Darkglass Brings the Anagram to Guitar: The Essentials Edition Is a $1,300 NAM-Native Modeler
Darkglass announced a Guitar Essentials Edition of its Anagram workstation on June 29 — a Sweetwater-exclusive build at $1,299.99 that adds 11 guitar amp models and three effects to the bass-first platform. The headline for guitarists isn't the amp count. It's that the Anagram loads NAM and AIDA-X captures natively, no proprietary conversion, three profiles at once.
Two Notes Genome 2.0 Adds a Free Parametric Capture Engine — And It Quietly Fixes the One Thing Static Captures Always Got Wrong
Genome 2.0 landed with iOS support, seven new amps, and a free capture studio. The headline everyone's running is 'all-in-one modeling suite.' The part that actually matters: PARADEX captures how an amp responds across its whole control range — so a captured amp finally cleans up when you roll your volume knob back, the way a static NAM or TONEX snapshot never did. Here's what that changes, and what a Helix or HX Stomp player should take from it.
EHX Ships the Pico Shimmer Cosmic Reverb at $149 — And Most of It Already Lives in Your Modeler
Electro-Harmonix put three shimmer worlds — Intergalactic, Off-World, and Etherdust — into a $149 sub-compact pedal that's available now. If you run a Helix or HX Stomp, two of those three sounds are already a parallel pitch-into-reverb path away from free. Here's how to recreate them, and the one scene that's genuinely worth $149.
Mooer's GE100 Pro Puts NAM, MNRS 2.0, and AI Tone-From-Text in a $96 Modeler
Mooer's new GE100 Pro is a sub-$100 floor modeler that loads NAM captures, runs MNRS 2.0 profiling, and generates tone settings from a text prompt. The battery-equipped Li version is $116. At this price the spec sheet reads like a typo — the real question is whether the modeling holds up.
Eventide Puts the Full H90 Library Into the H9 Footprint — the H9 Harmonizer Gen 2 Is $599, Ships June 24
Eventide announced the H9 Harmonizer Gen 2 this week: the iconic small-footprint multi-FX gets the complete 74-algorithm library from the flagship H90, a real screen, three Quick Knobs, stereo I/O, USB-C, and MIDI. It runs one algorithm at a time — it's half an H90, not a whole one — and it's $599, shipping globally June 24. Here's what actually changed, and why the workflow story matters more than the algorithm count.
TONE3000 Releases NAM Architecture 2 — Free, Open-Source, and It Beat Neural DSP and Line 6 in Blind Tests
On June 2, TONE3000 and NAM creator Steve Atkinson released Architecture 2 — a ground-up rebuild of the free Neural Amp Modeler engine. It runs better than Quad Cortex's capture engine at 50% CPU on a $3 chip, it's fully open source, and in a 1,000-person blind test it out-scored Neural DSP, IK ToneX, and Line 6 Proxy. The whole thing costs nothing.
Positive Grid's REACTOR Builds a Tone From a Text Prompt, a Recording, or a Photo — and It's $349
Positive Grid announced REACTOR on June 2 — a 1x12 combo (50W/$349, 100W/$449) with an 'Amp Intelligence' engine that generates a full signal chain from a typed description, an uploaded recording, or an image. It's the first time the company's AI tone engine has lived in hardware instead of the Spark app. Here's what's actually interesting about it if you think about tone as a system, and where the marketing gets ahead of the physics.
IK Multimedia Captures Three Museum-Grade '60s Marshall 45s for TONEX — Royal 45 Legends
IK's new Royal 45 Legends Signature Collection puts 50 Tone Models of three mid-'60s British 45-watt amps into TONEX — two captured from the Capitol Records vault, one from a European vintage collection, all run through V2 AI Machine Modeling. It's $99.99 ($79.99 intro), free for TONEX ONE+ owners, and it's the closest most of us will ever get to plugging into a 60-year-old amp that lives behind glass.
TONEX ONE+ Adds Bluetooth App Control and MIDI to IK's Pocket Modeler at $249.99
IK Multimedia launched the TONEX ONE+ on May 7. It is the same 48 mm wide aluminum brick as the original TONEX ONE, but with Bluetooth editing through the TONEX Control app, full TRS and USB MIDI, and 20 preset slots addressable from a switcher. Same $249.99 price. Same machine-learning amp models. The interesting question is what this changes for the backpack rig.
Chase Bliss Ships the Big Time at $999 — A Six-Year Stereo Delay Built Around '80s Rack DNA
Chase Bliss has officially launched the Big Time, a $999 hybrid digital/analog stereo delay built in collaboration with John Snyder of Electronic Audio Experiments. It is the most expensive pedal Chase Bliss has ever shipped, and it is a deliberate attempt to recreate the specific sonic fingerprint of early-'80s rack delays like the Lexicon PCM 70 and the Korg SDD-3000.
MXR Ships the EVH Modern High Gain — A Pedal Built Around 5150 III Channel 3, Not the Brown Sound
MXR's new $269.99 EVH Modern High Gain pedal started shipping April 28. It is not another brown-sound box — it is the 5150 III's third channel (the modern high-gain lead channel) compressed into a stompbox, with a 55Hz/80Hz bass shift switch, onboard noise gate, and a boost. For anyone running a Helix, Quad Cortex, or Kemper that already models the 5150 III, this is a useful reference point in the other direction.
Keeley RK2000 Funk Siren Delay Ships at $369, Reviving the Ibanez DM2000 Trey Anastasio Has Used for Decades
After weeks of teasing, Keeley has shipped the RK2000 Funk Siren Delay — a $369 floor pedal built around the character of the vintage Ibanez DM2000 rackmount that Trey Anastasio has used for most of his career. It does ping-pong pitch-shifted delays, LFO modulation, and stores presets with full MIDI.
NUX MG-50Li Ships April 20 With Three-DSP Modeling, DeepImage Profiling, and 5-Hour Battery
NUX confirms April 20 ship date for the MG-50Li at $499. It runs TS/AC-4K physical modeling across three dedicated DSPs, includes built-in DeepImage profiling, and has a five-hour rechargeable battery. This is the most capable battery-powered modeler shipping this month.
Valeton's New GP-150 and GP-180 Put NAM Support Under $200
Valeton's two new floorboard modelers ship with SnapTone NAM file support, 12-module parallel routing, and built-in battery — the GP-150 at $169.99 with an onboard expression pedal. For the budget modeler audience, this is the most interesting sub-$200 release since the Donner Arena 2000.
Quad Cortex Mini Starts Shipping to Pre-Order Customers
Neural DSP's compact flagship is finally landing on doorsteps. The Quad Cortex Mini packs the full CorOS experience into a smaller enclosure at EUR 1,299, and first impressions from early adopters are overwhelmingly positive.