Dimehead NAM player

Gear & Tools Talk šŸ”Š Amplification & Effects
1

OK interesting one here.

NAM is a free open source amp modeler , I talked about it in this thread The Plug in Place - #19 by math07

But doesnt get a lot of talk here, its pretty damned good and lots of free ā€˜ampsā€™ around to try out.

I found it responsive and very ā€˜activeā€™

So it seems Dimehead have put this in a pedal with some default amps loaded and a convolution reverb and some other toys (gate, IRs , tuner etc).

Sounds great but the downside is its ā‚¬595 which is a bit more than the nano cortex etc

2

I watched that this morning and Iā€™m more than a little curious but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I were to crack that box open the inside is going to be stuffed full of either Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Which in and of itself is not a bad thing. . . until you slap a $1000 price tag on it and your software development is done for free by other people.

First to market is not always the best option and Iā€™m looking forward to seeing what else comes along.

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3

Yeah be interesting to see whats inside, theres certainly some custom work around NAM itself, and I like the models but.

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4

Running on Pi. And sounding really good doing so. . .

5

Hey, I could be wrong and it might be worth every cent they are asking for but I donā€™t see that from where Iā€™m standing.

6

Yeah for sure the price is spicy

7

Even worse, itā€™s a small company, so who knows how long they will be around to support their product. But, if you absolutely need NAM in a pedal, Iā€™m not sure you realistically have any alternative unless youā€™re prepared to engineer your own solution on a Raspberry Pi.

I just run NAM on my laptop.

8

Yeah if you are at home etc you can just do that, on stage I guess its harder, this lets you take your NAM models live I guess without as much risk and trouble.

9

True. Personally though, if I were actually gigging, I think I would get a small form factor PC (like the Intel NUC box) exclusively for music use, and run everything on it (including all other distortion / modulation / delay / reverb / etc. effect plug-ins), plus a midi pedal controller. I think the dimehead unit might makes sense (especially at the current price point) if it also does multi-fx, meaning itā€™s literally all the pedals you need, but it doesnā€™t.

10

Plenty of similar options from UA, NeuralDSP , ToneX etc but this is certainly up there in price

I think the kemper player costs more but hat has effects slots?

11

I believe the Mod Dwarf supports NAM, although with some limitations. Itā€™s around the same price as the Dimehead, but does a whole load more.

As I said, it has some limitations, but itā€™s probably enough for a gig.

I believe @LievenDV has one of these, and may be able to comment.

Cheers,

Keith

12

Ampless pedalboards; really an interesting topic!

NAM started out as a pc only plugin because itā€™s processor requirements are pretty high.
The tech iq quite popular and logically, the requests for ā€œportable liveā€ solutions quickly grew in numbers.

I have a MOD Dwarf;
It supports NAM (amongst other ā€œprofilingā€ tech) but only the nano scale models so I would not recommend it for NAM applications. I use the AIDA-X technology, which is more light weight on the processor of the unit while the results are pretty nice. There arenā€™t 1000ā€™s of profiles available but I can make my own by transforming a dry sound and submitting wet and dry. the profiling algoritms calculate the function dry->wet.

The AIDA people are also bringing their tech to Chaos audio:
https://chaosaudio.com
Stay tuned

If you donā€™t mind Leoā€™s Italian accent, you could check videoā€™s like this:
(It should give you some extra insight on what is very popular on the market right now)

Expensive, for a floor pedalā€¦they all are
BUT if you like tinkering, profiling yourself or want a vast amount of options, your choice might be different. Iā€™m not fooled by quantities, since I usually work with 1 amp live (which I " crafted" myself using a blend of digital high gain amps and some EQā€™ing)

BTW; I LOVE not having run aroudn with amps and speakers :smiley:
and the modelling technology is very fascinating.
I think a guitarist should at least know what it is all about, whether he/she goed for such an approach or not.

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