TONE3000 launches free open-source guitar and bass plugin with 700,000 tones

TONE3000 released the TONE3000 Plugin on September 1, 2026: a free, open-source guitar and bass plugin with the platform’s full library of more than 700,000 NAM captures and impulse responses built in. It runs in every major DAW, or as a standalone app with no DAW at all.

Until now, playing a TONE3000 tone meant a ritual. Find it on the site. Download the file. Unzip it, file it away, load it into a third-party NAM loader like Steve Atkinson’s Gateway plugin. Want to try another tone? Do it all again. The new plugin deletes every one of those steps: you browse amps, pedals, cabinets, full rigs and acoustic spaces inside the plugin window and play.

Log in with a TONE3000 account and your saved favorites, recently used, created and private tones show up too.

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Because the TONE3000 Plugin is open source, right now is the worst it will ever be. We're excited to see what the community does with it.

Why a free, open-source plugin undercuts the $100 amp sim

Building a traditional amp sim plugin meant hiring DSP engineers (the specialists who write audio processing code) to model a fixed set of amps, a process that took years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The result sold for $100 or more and came with a set number of tones. More tones meant another purchase.

The TONE3000 Plugin connects to a library that grows daily instead. Each new tone shared on the platform appears in the plugin immediately, with no update and no purchase. The modeling technology, the plugin code on GitHub and the library itself are all free.

“Every layer is open source by design,” said Woodbury Shortridge, TONE3000’s Co-Founder and CTO. “We’re betting the future of tone belongs to the people creating it, not to whoever owns the technology.”

The engine behind it is NAM A2, which I covered when it launched in June 2026. In TONE3000’s MUSHRA blind listening test with over 1,000 participants, A2-Full scored 100, level with the real recorded gear, ahead of Neural DSP V2 at 94, ToneX at 90.5 and Line 6 Proxy at 77. Guitar World called A2 a “watershed moment” for digital modeling, and after HeadRush added native support, MusicRadar called it an “iPod moment for electric guitar tone.”

The numbers since June back the momentum: the library doubled from 300,000 to 700,000 tones in three months, and the platform passed 600,000 monthly active users and 10 million downloads.

What the TONE3000 Plugin gives guitarists and producers day to day

The feature set goes past simple tone browsing:

• Chains: stack unlimited NAM captures and IRs in any order to build complete signal chains.
• Dual chains and stereo: run two chains with panning control, or widen a mono chain with the Spread control.
• Calibration: match your audio interface’s input level to calibrated captures.
• EQ and control: parametric EQ per block plus global EQ, oversampling and MIDI mapping.

It ships as VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP, LV2 and standalone, on macOS, Windows and Linux, and TONE3000 lists every major DAW as compatible, including Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools and Reaper. The same API already feeds hardware from HeadRush, Blackstar, Darkglass, LAVA MUSIC and Chaos Audio, so a tone you favorite on your laptop can follow you onto a pedalboard. For how this stacks up against paid options, my roundup of the best AI VST plugins covers the field.