A small workshop for finding your sound.

Conversant Soundworks is Steven Converse, a guitarist and artist making free tools that help players find their own sound, with a few more on the bench that reach past tone into the fretboard and the way music fits together.

RigSuite is the first of them, and the work featured here: a pair of free Windows programs that measure and organize your sprawling libraries of neural amp models, cabinet impulses, and reverbs, then turn that analysis into a rig that listens to itself and gets out of the way. One less thing between you and your sound, free to use even in the music you sell.

Get RigSuite Read the field guide New: 0.92 release notes

RigSuite 0.92 · FREE read the 0.92 release notes

Two Windows programs that work as a pair, and the first tools out of the workshop. RigScope measures your neural amp models, cabinets, and reverbs, then writes what it learns into the files; RigSculpt plays them, and reads that same information back. Together they turn a folder of a thousand cryptically-named models into something you can navigate by sound.

VST3 plug-in · Windows

Play the rig

Not a single-model player. It's a full rig built around neural amp models, running two independent amp-and-cab paths, mono or true stereo with one-click balancing, each with its own input calibration, EQ, and pan.

  • Amp & tone shaping: a pickup-voicing model in front, an eight-band output EQ with an Accentuate control after, and a tuner.
  • A full pedalboard: a three-voice drive, a four-voice compressor, a chorus, a vibe, five delay modes, and six reverbs (five original engines plus convolution).
  • Analysis-aware: it reads what RigScope writes into your files to match one amp's response to another, voice its effects to the rig, and lay out your library by how the models actually sound.
RigSculpt's AMP page: pickup voicing, two neural amp paths with BUILD STEREO and RIG FIT, output EQ, and the cabinet loader
Desktop app · Windows

Know the rig

Point it at a folder and it listens to each model and cabinet, measures what they do, and says it in plain English. A library you couldn't read by name, you can now read by sound.

  • Amp Bench: sorts your neural amp models into six measured archetypes and finds the ones that sound alike.
  • Cab Bench: fingerprints cabinet impulse responses and reshapes them without loss, with EQ, a voicing borrowed from another cabinet, or a blend of mic layers.
  • Reverb Bench: measures, sculpts, and builds convolution-reverb impulse responses.
RigScope's three benches: the Amp Bench Inspect view (measured EQ shape, written overview, stats), the Cab Bench impulse-response editor, and the Reverb Bench decay sculptor

How they work together

RigScope writes its measurements straight into your .nam and .wav files. RigSculpt reads them back, so the plug-in already knows a model's voicing, breakup, and feel the moment you load it. Nothing is locked away in a database; the knowledge travels with the files, and any tool that can read them (including a language model) can pick it up.

Why it's free

RigSuite is free, including for the music you sell. No account, and nothing held back for a paid tier. It stands on the Neural Amp Modeler ecosystem, the open project created by Steve Atkinson, and this is a way of paying that forward.

The tools got built because sorting a big library by ear is slow, tedious work. Once they were good enough to fix that, giving them away was simpler than selling them. Support is welcome on Ko-fi, where the downloads live, though it's never required.

What's in the box FREE

  • RigSculpt (VST3 plug-in) and RigScope (desktop app), for Windows.
  • Factory neural amp models, cabinet impulses, and reverb IRs, recorded and measured here at the bench.
  • The field guide, with the whole suite documented in detail.

The Workshop

I'm a guitarist and artist first. Conversant Soundworks is one person at a bench (me), and RigSuite started the way most things here do: with a sound I was chasing.

A lot of my life in music has been that chase: shaping tones, comparing gear, building signal chains, capturing sounds, and listening closely to work out why one combination makes me want to play and another doesn't. Over time it became a large library of things I cared about: neural amp models, cabinet responses, reverbs. It also became more and more time spent searching, comparing, and rebuilding instead of playing. I wanted better ways to understand what I had and shape it into something personal. RigSuite grew out of that.

I'm genuinely excited by what this technology makes possible. Neural amp modeling is extraordinary, and open work now lets one person build things that used to take a team. I care just as much about the role it plays. A rig is a tool; the models, the cabinets, the reverbs, the analysis are all tools, and the player stays at the center. RigSuite is meant to clear the friction that gets in the way of playing while leaving the choices that matter to you: what you like, what sounds like you, how you get there. It's here to help you shape your own tone, not to decide it for you.

RigSuite is where the workshop started, not where it ends. The tools I'm building next reach past tone and into the fretboard itself: the shapes, the harmony, the ideas about how music fits together that took me years to work out, made easier to see and to hear. The through-line stays the same, which is free tools that help you understand your own playing and find your own voice.

None of it would exist without Steve Atkinson's Neural Amp Modeler, shared openly, and the wider open-source community whose work I lean on. RigSculpt began as my own adaptation of his plug-in; RigScope grew out of wanting to actually navigate a big library of models. Everything built around that foundation (the pickup voicing, drive, compression, modulation, delay, five reverb engines, output EQ, stereo dual-rig operation, the library tools, Synergize, the MIDI pedalboard) was developed here, for RigSuite. It's become a substantial body of work, and I'm glad to be confident about that while staying clear about where it comes from.

Under it all is hundreds of hours of design, listening, testing, and refining: granular decisions about how a control feels, what belongs in the chain, and the words in the interface. I want to be transparent that I used modern development tools, including AI, to take on a lot of the demanding engineering that would otherwise need a much larger team. Every design, musical, and technical decision here is still mine; the tools just let me keep those decisions closely connected and keep refining each part until it reaches the sound and experience I have in mind. I understand AI use is a sensitive topic for some, so I'll say it plainly: anything I build this way will always be free, and scoped to be a tool for public benefit.

This comes out of an actual working practice, from the records and the videos to a rig that has to hold up:

8K+YouTube subscribers 3.5KFacebook followers Bandcampthe music

Work with me

The tools are free. Alongside them I take on a small number of personal sessions through Ko-fi, on a rotating basis. This is the hands-on side of the workshop, where we work on your music directly.

Async coaching

A close listen, and honest feedback

Send me a track, or just your playing, and I'll sit with it and come back with structured, candid notes. Not a checklist. It's the kind of coaching I always valued most across twenty-plus years of lessons: player to player, artist to artist. Some of the best I ever had were with Nick Johnston, who talks to his students as peers, all of us chasing the same thing, which is getting out of our own way. That's the spirit here. I'll get into the weeds with you and help you get out of yours.

Guitar lessons

The same, with room to go deeper

Ongoing lessons in that same peer-to-peer spirit, with room to go back and forth in real time. I suggest starting with an async session first, so I get to know you as a player and we can both tell whether our perspectives line up with where you're trying to go. So much of teaching is finding the right approach for the person in front of you, and every path is different, so that first listen is the honest way to know we're a fit before we commit to more.

Remote gear sessions

Your holy-grail tones, on my amps

Book time to remotely dial in some of my vintage amps and capture them as your own. RigSuite's factory presets already cover a lot of ground on these amps, and the premium packs cover more, but those are dialed the way I like them, and taste is personal. A session is how you walk away with a few .nam files that genuinely feel like yours.

These rotate, and there's more besides these. Making music comes first, so I pause the sessions when I'm deep in creative work. Whatever's open right now is on Ko-fi.

Music

Enigma (feat. Nick Johnston), from the album Palette.

Palette is on all the major streaming services, including Apple Music and Spotify. The best place to buy it is Bandcamp.

Get RigSuite FREE

RigSuite is a free download on Ko-fi. Grab both programs, point RigScope at your models, and load one into RigSculpt on a guitar track.

Download on Ko-fi Read the field guide

Want more of my own tones? Premium .nam packs on Ko-fi are expanded, more flexible sets in the same dialed-in flavor as RigSuite's factory presets, each embedded with RigScope analysis so they drop straight into RigSculpt.