Hey NAM community, thanks for downloading and testing these free tools I'm putting out there for the community, and thanks to those of you who have supported. I'd still reiterate that you should consider supporting Steve Atkinson first, because NAM doesn't exist without him, and I literally would not have been able to start this.
Hearing positive feedback of people actually playing through this and finding it useful is the whole reason it exists.
The patch I previewed is done, and honestly it grew while it was under testing. Several things I listed as "on the horizon" made it in, plus a few that weren't on the list at all. So instead of "here's what's coming," this is the completed list. If you already have RigSuite installed, "Check for updates" in either app will now tell you you're behind; the new build is at the same Ko-fi download. Your existing presets and sessions load exactly as they are... nothing changes unless you touch the new controls.
Work completed: RigSuite 0.92
RigSculpt
- New IN tab: all the before-the-amp signal cleanup in one place, in signal order
- HUSH: one-button hum removal that measures your rig's actual hum and subtracts it
- NOISE FILTER: tames hiss while your notes ring out, not just between them
- NOISE GATE upgrades: adjustable attack/hold/release, a floor control, per-path switches in stereo
- TRUE STEREO INPUT: this was "on the horizon" in the preview; it's in. Left channel into amp A, right into amp B
- Pickup Revoicer CUSTOM mode: bend the 16 built-in pickup types into your own and save them under My Pickups
- DESCENT unlocked AND steadier: the real-time down-tuner is out of developer hiding, labeled experimental, with a genuinely improved engine and a new STABILITY control
- FULL MIDI CONTROL: not even on the preview list. Map any MIDI controller to the whole plugin, up to six actions per switch, expression-pedal sweeps, plus an on-screen pedalboard view
- Performance: lower CPU in common setups, and the model/cab library pages stop rescanning your folders every time you reopen the editor
- Clearer RigScope guidance: models missing RigScope's analysis are now flagged, with a short once-per-session explainer of what that means
- Quality of life: "don't ask again" on the library-copy prompt, quiet daily update check (with an off switch), grabbable scrollbars in the model and cab browsers, and the version display cleanup (that weird "0.0.00" some of you saw in the installer is gone)
RigScope
- Bulk metadata editing is honest now: warns when files can't be written and reports exactly what was saved
- A launch crash fixed: a half-written analysis cache could crash the app at every boot, and survive reinstalls. Fixed, and the app now heals itself
- A guided path to "RigSculpt-ready": centralizing and embedding are now one clear two-step flow with reminders, so your library actually powers RigSculpt's measurement-aware features
And the field guide (bundled with the installers and at conversantsoundworks.com) has been rewritten to cover all of it, including a plain walkthrough of getting your library RigSculpt-ready.
Full details: RigSculpt
A new IN tab
Everything that cleans up and shapes your guitar signal before the amp is in one place, in the order it actually happens. The blocks dim and illuminate like pedals on a board, so you can see at a glance what's actually in your chain.
Three tools to address noise problems
(If you saw my release video, you probably heard that my PC / recording environment introduces an unacceptable level of noise, and you can only imagine if I was playing through a true single coil; these address that VERY convincingly.) The three get lumped together a lot, so here's who does what:
HUSH goes after hum -- that steady, pitched drone your pickups pick up from mains power. It's there even while you're playing. You teach it with one button: volume up, don't play for three seconds, and it measures your rig's actual hum... the exact pitch (real hum isn't always textbook 60 Hz) and the exact level, then subtracts a clean synthesized copy. Your guitar signal never passes through a filter here, and the correction physically can't get louder than the hum it measured. It also remembers your measurement between sessions.
The NOISE FILTER goes after hiss -- the broadband "shhh" that has no pitch, so it can't be subtracted. Unlike a gate, it works while your notes ring out: as your sound decays toward the noise floor, the hiss fades down with it instead of hanging on until a gate slams it shut.
The NOISE GATE covers silence -- when you're not playing, it shuts the door. It now has adjustable attack, hold, and release, plus a floor control if you'd rather pull noise down than hard-mute it. In stereo, each amp path gets its own gate switch.
Short version: hum gets subtracted, hiss gets ducked under your playing, and the gate handles the gaps. They stack. I might simplify the UI later, but this is what's working for me right now.
True stereo input
In the preview I said this might or might not make the patch. It made it. Some of you pointed out use cases I hadn't prioritized: RigSculpt isn't only being used for guitar. People are running keys, drum buses, whole mixes, and stereo outboard captures through NAM models. Until now the plugin folded whatever it was fed down to mono before the amps, because that's the honest thing to do with a guitar DI. Now there's a STEREO IN switch: left channel into amp A, right channel into amp B, with each side gated and conditioned on its own, so an already-stereo source keeps its image all the way through instead of getting collapsed and rebuilt. It arms once you have a model loaded on B, you can flip it by right-clicking the IN block in the chain strip, and if you feed the plugin a genuinely stereo signal while it's still summing to mono, it will notice and ask you once whether you meant to.
More configurable pickup revoicings
The Pickup Revoicer has a CUSTOM mode. Also want to clarify what the Pickup Revoicer actually is, since some people asked: it's not a clone of any specific pickup, it's a simplified electrical model of how pickups behave, so it's an approximation. And yes, at any fixed setting, what comes out resolves to a pre-amp filter curve, but so does a real pickup swap. The difference is which curves, and who does the math. With an EQ you shape bands directly, each independent, and you can just as easily dial something no pickup on earth would produce. Here the knobs change the pickup's recipe (how much wire on the coil, how wide a window of string it hears, how much damping) and the curve is calculated from that, so you can only land on responses a real build could make. Change the recipe and the resonant peak, its sharpness, and the output level all shift together in the physically right ratios, cable loading included. Could you copy any single setting with a careful parametric EQ? Sure, if you already knew exactly what to dial. This approximates that math for you, and keeps doing it as you turn the knobs. Because it sits before the amp, a hotter, darker recipe drives the amp model into breakup differently. It's not just tinting the tone afterward. Start from any of the 16 built-in types, bend it, save it under My Pickups, and use your pickups on either side of the conversion. Saved pickups survive updates and reinstalls, like presets, but let me know if they're messing up for some reason.
DESCENT
The real-time down-tuner I have been struggling (and still am) to get right comes out of hiding... and it got meaningfully better on the way out. Honest history: Descent has been in the plugin since the beginning, buried in developer settings, because I'm not happy with the engine yet. Two things changed in this patch. First, the low end got a real engine upgrade: splices are now aligned to the pitch it's actually tracking, which cut the warble on low single notes and power chords dramatically -- drop-C and 8-string territory, which used to be the worst offenders. Second, there's a new STABILITY control beside the voicing switch: it trades a little tracking agility for steadier held chords, and when you bounce with Render quality set to Maximum, your render is baked at full stability regardless of where the knob sits, so prints always get the best the engine can do. Latency doesn't move either way.
Polyphonic material still isn't where I want it, so it's labeled experimental rather than me sitting on it any longer. For quick, fun drop-tuned chugs and noodling... not tracking an album... it does the job, by popular demand. If you are smart about this stuff and love everything else except DESCENT, please hit me up via email (in the plugin) and point me to some literature to consider different approaches. I've tried several, including a machine learning approach on amplitude- and timing-aligned REAL takes of guitar DIs that I meticulously recorded. I hope you know that despite me leveraging AI for a lot of the coding on this, that obsessive level of detail lives all over this plugin, because it's something I'm building for me too.
Full MIDI control
This wasn't on the preview list, and it might be the biggest single thing in the patch. The old numpad-keyboard MIDI experiment was too convoluted, so it's retired from view, and in its place is a proper MIDI controller system: Settings > WORKFLOW > "MIDI controller setup...". Point any controller at it: hit Learn, press the button / pedal / key, pick what it does. One trigger can fire up to SIX actions (one tap = flip the delay + reverb + gate together, if that's your thing), switches can be momentary or latching, program changes still recall presets, and continuous controls (expression pedals, knobs) can smoothly sweep ten targets -- output and input level, drive amount, delay / reverb / compressor mix, mod depth, Descent's stability, and more. Every block is switchable, including all the new IN blocks and stereo input itself.
There's also a BOARD view: an on-screen pedalboard you lay your mappings onto -- pads and knobs, defaulting to 2 rows of 4 pads plus 4 knobs (modeled on my own controller), with a bigger 4x4-plus-8-knob layout if you've got more hardware. Click an empty pad to create a mapping and learn it in one motion, click a mapped pad to fire it from the screen, right-click to edit. Mappings persist across sessions and reinstalls, and there's a "Reset all MIDI" if you want a clean slate.
Performance
When your session sample rate matches the model's native rate, the resampler now steps aside entirely -- identical sound, less CPU, a little less latency. A flat output EQ costs nothing now. And the NAMS / CABS library pages no longer rescan your whole folder every time you reopen the editor; with a big IR collection, reopening used to mean a visible re-scan and now it's near-instant.
Clearer RigScope guidance in the plugin
A model that doesn't carry RigScope's embedded analysis now shows an amber badge in the slot strip, and the first time in a session you load one by hand you get a short explainer of what "unframed" means and which features it unlocks -- with a "don't show again" and a Settings toggle. It fires at most once per session and never on preset loads, so it informs without nagging.
Plus the small quality-of-life stuff from the preview: a "don't ask again" option on the library-copy prompt, and a quiet once-a-day update check (with an off switch).
Full details: RigScope
Metadata editing now tells you when a file wasn't written
A sharp-eyed user in the NAM group found that bulk-editing metadata updated everything inside RigScope (the archetype view, the tables, all of it) but didn't always write the changes into the .nam files themselves, while editing files one at a time seemed to work. Here's what was actually happening: RigScope only writes into .nam files it owns (the copies made when you centralize your library). That's deliberate -- RigScope should never rewrite files in your personal folders uninvited; I built this in because I had concerns about whether it could affect hardware compatibility. The single-file editor has always said so plainly, with a checkbox that disables and explains itself for un-centralized models. The bulk editor didn't say anything, it just quietly skipped those files while the app's own views updated, which looked exactly like a save that worked. That silence was the bug. Now the bulk editor warns you up front when part of your selection isn't centralized, and after saving it reports the honest tally: "wrote X files, skipped Y (not centralized)", with a pointer to Library > Centralize to fix it. One related tip: when your library is centralized, edits go into RigScope's copies, so if you check a file in your original download folder, it won't show the change. Right-click > Reveal in file explorer takes you to the file RigScope actually maintains. Thanks to the reporter who said he had been staying up all night playing around until he found this one. :D
A launch crash is fixed
Another user hit RigScope crashing at every boot with "File is not a zip file" -- and reinstalling didn't help, because the library lives in your user data and survives a reinstall. Root cause: if the app got interrupted at exactly the wrong moment while writing one of its analysis cache files, the half-written file poisoned every boot after that. Now those caches are written atomically so that state can't be created in the first place, and if the app ever does meet a corrupt cache it skips it, quarantines it, and just re-analyzes that model instead of dying. (If you're stuck in this exact crash on the old build before you update: deleting the "features" folder inside %LOCALAPPDATA%\RigScope\library gets you booting again.)
A guided path to "RigSculpt-ready"
This is the answer to the most common confusion I've seen: how do I actually get RigSculpt's measurement-aware features (the measured-EQ reference, archetype browsing, Synergize, find-similar) running on MY models? It takes two steps that were easy to miss: centralize (RigScope makes its own copies of your models -- your originals are never modified) and embed (write the analysis into those copies so RigSculpt can read it). Now the app walks you through it: after an analysis run it offers to make those models RigSculpt-ready and lays out the two steps plainly; finishing centralize chains straight into "Step 2 of 2 -- embed," with an explicit list of what embedding does and does NOT do; and if your library is sitting one step away from ready, a gentle boot reminder (at most once every two weeks) points it out. On the RigSculpt side, scanning your RigScope library and finding it empty now explains what's missing and how to fix it, instead of silently showing nothing.
And the field guide has been rewritten to match everything above: the IN section, stereo input, the full MIDI chapter, and a plain "two steps to RigSculpt-ready" walkthrough, plus installation notes (64-bit only, the Windows SmartScreen prompt, and a reminder that the only legitimate download is the Ko-fi page). Read it here.
Again: your existing presets and sessions will load exactly as they are. Nothing should change unless you touch the new controls.
Thanks for all your feedback, and I'm really, really glad it's helping people out.