Guitar amp + effects for Windows · standalone app + VST3 plugin

The guitar tones from your favorite songs, ready to play.

Describe the sound you’re after — in plain English, or out loud — and ToneGenie builds the whole rig and plays it live: amp, cabinet, pedals and all. Then take the exact same sound into your DAW with the included VST3 plugin.

Windows 10/11 · one-time purchase · no subscription · no account

Make wish

Example: typing “warm blackface-style clean with a slow tremolo and a touch of plate” builds the chain Amp Clean, Cab US Clean 2×12, Mod Tremolo, Verb Plate. The demo types four such requests in turn — the others are “the tone from the intro of My Own Summer”, “shoegaze wash — big fuzz into shimmer” and “spanky funk clean with an envelope filter” — lighting up each block of the chain as it goes.

Type it or say it. Small changes — “a bit less reverb”, “add more gain” — apply instantly, mid-note.

The ToneGenie TONE tab: the First Wish factory tone on the Clean amp voice with the UK Classic 4×12 cabinet, its rig description and one-click tweak buttons
The Tone tabA factory tone in the app: the song it’s based on, the rig it built and one-click tweaks that apply while you play.
5Built-in amps
6,500+Community amp packs
4Built-in cabinets
750+Community cab packs
65+Built-in effects
1,900+Community pedal packs
200+Jam tracks

One product, two halves

Design it in the app. Play it in your DAW.

ToneGenie ships as a pair: a standalone app that designs tones, and a VST3 plugin that plays them while you record. They run the same audio engine.

The App

The tone workshop

Where sounds are made — and where you practice.

  • Describe a tone by text or voice, then play it live through your interface
  • Full amp, cab and pedalboard control — every knob live while you play
  • Tuner, looper, metronome, jam tracks, recorder, visualizer
  • Works with any output — onboard sound to ASIO interfaces
The VST3 Plugin

The recording rig

The same sounds, inside your DAW.

  • Every preset you design travels both ways, app ↔ plugin
  • Every knob is host-automatable
  • Reports its true latency so your DAW keeps tracks aligned
  • Passes pluginval at maximum strictness — zero failures
They can’t drift apart. An automated test renders the same preset through both halves and compares the two renders — they match within 1.5×10⁻⁸, and the preset path itself is checked at byte level. Same preset, same samples, same sound — on every build.

How it works

Say it. Hear it. Keep it.

Step 1

Describe it

A song, an era, a genre, a piece of gear — whatever words you’d use to a friend. Type it or just say it out loud.

“the tone from the chorus of Black Hole Sun”
Step 2

Make wish

ToneGenie builds the rig — amp voice, cabinet, pedals, effect order, settings — and starts playing it immediately. Nudge anything by hand or by voice.

“warmer, and a bit less delay”
Step 3

Play & record

Practice live in the app, or load the preset in the plugin and track it. The recorder keeps a clean DI of every take, so you can re-amp later.

preset → your DAW, unchanged

No subscription, no middleman. AI tone design runs on your own key from any of five providers — you pay the provider directly, and ToneGenie takes nothing. Google’s has a free tier, so you can design tones without paying anyone at all. Don’t want a key? The built-in offline parser still understands effects and styles, and every knob is yours to turn.

Amps & cabinets

Five voices, built from the circuits up

Plus every amp the internet has captured.

The ToneGenie AMP tab: the CLEAN voice selected, with live gain and tone-stack knobs above the full amp head artwork
The Amp tabPick a voice, or load your own capture on the COMMUNITY tab. Every knob is live while you play.

Circuit-voiced, not sampled

Each built-in voice is voiced from real circuit behavior, with tone stacks verified component for component against published schematics of the classics. That’s why the knobs behave like an amp’s: continuous, interacting, live while you play.

  • CleanBlackface-style sparkle and headroom
  • BritishClassic-stack crunch and bark
  • AmericanWarm break-up with spring in its step
  • ModernTight, saturated high-gain
  • BoutiqueTouch-sensitive D-style smoothness

Or load a capture of the real thing

ToneGenie plays NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) captures — free, community-made recordings of real amplifiers — as your amp. Browse and download thousands of them without leaving the app, run two at once and blend, and even use captures as drive pedals — up to three stacked.

Cabinets, mic’d your way

Four bundled cabinet IRs plus any WAV impulse response you import. Blend two cabs, place up to two studio mics (five classic mic models) on a draggable top-down speaker view, add one of seven room ambiences, and finish with a cab channel strip — low cut, high cut, phase, level.

The ToneGenie CABINET tab: the US Modern 4×12 cabinet selected, with low-cut and high-cut knobs and level-matching switches
The Cabinet tabBundled cabs, community captures, low and high cut, level matching and a second cab to blend.

Effects

A pedalboard with more than 65 effects

Drag them into any order. 132 one-click flavors across the board mean a good starting point is never more than one click away.

Drive

  • Boost 2 models
  • Overdrive & Fuzz 8 models
  • Capture Pedal stack up to 3
  • Octave Fuzz

Modulation

  • Chorus 6 models
  • Dimensional
  • Flanger
  • Phaser
  • Vibe
  • Rotary
  • Tremolo
  • Vibrato
  • Auto-Pan
  • Ring Mod
  • Slicer

Time & space

  • Delay 7 modes · tap · sync
  • Reverb 5 modes + shimmer
  • Spring Reverb
  • Pre-Verb
  • Swell

Pitch & voice

  • Pitch Shift 6 modes
  • Octave
  • Harmony
  • Smart Harmony in-key
  • Harmonizer multi-voice
  • Drop Tune
  • Detune
  • Doubler

Texture

  • Phonograph
  • Lo-Fi
  • Granular
  • Freeze
  • Talk Box
  • Acoustic Sim 4 modes
  • Guitar Synth

Dynamics & tone shaping

  • Noise Gate
  • Compressor
  • Multiband Comp
  • Wah 4 voicings
  • Auto-Wah
  • 9-Band EQ
  • Parametric EQ
  • Hum Filter
  • Stereo Width
New in 3.0

Dimensional

A true-stereo spatial chorus, built from the published schematic of a mid-’80s two-chip studio dimension unit. Anti-phase modulation on opposite sides means it reads as width, not warble — and folds back to mono cleanly.

New in 3.0

Phonograph

One knob crossfades a squishy compressor into a warped, wobbling “ruined record” vibrato, in the style of a cult lo-fi pedal. Six flavors, from Warped 45 to Haunted Room.

EQ

See your sound while you shape it.

A 9-band graphic EQ with a live spectrum analyzer running behind a measured response curve — drag the curve itself, or the faders. Place it before or after the amp. It measures dead-on: ask a band for +6.0 dB and that’s exactly what you get.

The ToneGenie EQ tab: a measured response curve above a brushed-metal 9-band fader panel with low-cut and high-cut knobs
The EQ tabNine named bands from rumble to air, low and high cut, before/after amp placement. The same view lives in the plugin.

The practice room

Everything around the tone, too

Jam tracks

223 jam tracks across a dozen-plus genres, filterable by genre, key and tuning, with A–B looping and settable start points.

Looper

Record, overdub and trim up to 90 seconds of your fully processed sound, with a live waveform view.

Tuner

Chromatic, with 45 tunings across 6-, 7- and 8-string guitars — down into drop-tuned 8-string territory.

Recorder + DI

Every take is saved with a bit-identical dry DI track alongside it, so you can re-amp any performance later.

Metronome

Tap tempo, time signatures from 2/4 to 7/8, subdivisions, accented downbeats — locked to your monitoring, never printed to your recording.

Jam view

A fullscreen visualizer driven by what you play — note pitch drives the color — with 16 built-in scenes and classic music-visualizer presets.

Setlists & snapshots

Order your tones for a session or a gig and step through hands-free. Rig changes are gapless — delay and reverb tails ring out under the new sound.

MIDI control

Map an expression pedal to wah, volume or gain with sweep calibration; a footswitch taps the looper; program changes step your setlist.

Audition

No guitar in hand? ToneGenie plays a short performance through the current rig so you can hear any tone, anywhere.

The VST3 plugin

Built to be trusted in a session

In your DAW

  • Windows x64 VST3, validated across sample rates from 44.1 to 192 kHz
  • Every parameter automatable, with numbering frozen so old sessions keep their automation lanes
  • True latency reported to the host, so tracks stay sample-aligned
  • Resizable editor with the same look and knob feel as the app

Held to a standard

  • Passes pluginval at strictness 10 — the maximum — across all 25 test suites, zero failures
  • Memory-clean under AddressSanitizer
  • No memory allocation on the audio thread; denormal- and NaN/Inf-hardened across all 24 processing entry points
  • Output level consistent within 0.14 dB across every supported sample rate

Engineering

Measured, not marketed

We won’t tell you it sounds amazing — that’s your call, and the trial is free. What we can show you is the engineering: every tonal decision in ToneGenie is verified by measurement, and the numbers below are from those measurements, not a brochure.

Measured engineering figures
Anti-aliasing8× oversampling around every nonlinearity — cascaded half-band filters with ≥78 dB stopband — plus first-order antiderivative anti-aliasing on the tube stages. Measured aliasing floor: −73.5 dB or better at maximum gain, on every voice.
App ↔ plugin parityBoth halves run the same native engine over the same rig format. Headless render match: within 1.5×10⁻⁸. A byte-level test enforces it on every build.
Tone stacksVerified component for component against published schematics of the circuits they’re modeled on.
CPUAll processing is CPU-based DSP — no GPU needed. ≈0.1 ms of processing per audio block; even a worst-case parallel rig sits around half the real-time budget on a modern quad-core.
Latency43 samples through the amp path, reported honestly to the host; the app shows your real, negotiated round-trip latency in the status bar, live.
StabilityAutomatic recovery from audio-device dropouts.
UpdatesOne-click updates are cryptographically signed (Ed25519) — the signature, not the server, is the root of trust.

Pricing

Buy once. New features arrive free.

No subscription. No account. And when a trial ends, ToneGenie never goes silent on you.

Free trial
Free for 14 days, everything unlocked

Then it stays useful — free, forever:

  • Your own amp captures keep playing at full quality
  • Your own cabinet IRs, plus a bundled 4×12 cab
  • A ten-pedal board: gate, comp, drive, wah, chorus, delay, reverb and more
  • Capture pedals — still stackable, three deep
What the free tier keeps

Nothing to buy today — the button above puts you on the launch list instead.

About AI costs: tone design uses your own API key from any of five providers, and you pay that provider directly — ToneGenie adds nothing on top and runs no subscription. Google’s Gemini key has a free tier, so most players can design tones without paying anyone at all. Prefer no key? The offline parser and every manual control work without one.

FAQ

Fair questions

Do I need a subscription or an account?

No. ToneGenie is a one-time purchase with offline license activation — no account, no login, no recurring fees. New features arrive free in updates.

Do I need an AI key to use it?

No — and you may never need to pay for one. Google’s Gemini API has a free tier, so you can get a key at no cost and use tone-by-description straight away. ToneGenie supports five providers; whichever you choose, you deal with them directly and ToneGenie takes no cut — paid keys typically run a fraction of a cent per request. With no key at all, the built-in offline parser still understands effect and style requests, and every knob, amp, cab and effect works by hand.

Does it work offline?

The audio engine is fully offline — once a tone is loaded, nothing needs the internet. You only need a connection for AI tone generation, downloading captures and jam-track downloads.

What do I need to run it?

Minimum: 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, a dual-core CPU, 4 GB RAM and any audio output — onboard sound works. Recommended: a quad-core CPU and an ASIO audio interface for the lowest latency (a 64-sample buffer at 48 kHz lands around 4–6 ms round trip). No GPU is required. The plugin is VST3, Windows x64.

Is there a Mac version?

Not yet — ToneGenie is Windows-only today, and a Mac version is in the works. We’d rather not name a date until it’s close, but it is coming.

Which plugin formats are supported?

Windows VST3 today, which covers most DAWs. More formats are on the way — AU alongside the Mac build, and CLAP after that. Both halves already run the same engine, so adding a format is packaging work rather than a rewrite.

What’s a NAM capture?

NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) is a free, open standard for “capturing” the sound of a real amplifier into a small file. Players around the world have captured thousands of real amps and shared them freely. ToneGenie loads these captures as your amp — and even lets you use them as drive pedals — so your amp collection is as big as the community’s.

What happens when the trial ends?

It becomes a free capture player rather than going quiet: your own NAM captures and cabinet IRs keep playing at full quality, one bundled cabinet stays available, and a ten-pedal board keeps working. The built-in amp voices, AI design and the rest of the effects wait for a license.

Will updates break my DAW sessions?

The plugin’s parameter numbering is frozen by design, so automation lanes in old sessions keep working across updates. Sessions also store the fully resolved rig, so a project opens sounding the way you left it.

Three wishes always seemed a bit stingy.

Ask for a sound.

14 days, everything unlocked, no card and no account. If it earns a place on your desktop, it’s one payment — ever.

Get the launch email

Not on sale quite yet. The launch email is a single message on launch day — nothing else, ever.