Guitar → GATE → WHAMMY → WAH → COMP → FUZZ → TS-808 → DS-1 → ML-2 → PRE-EQ → AMP → CAB → EQ → FLANGER → CHORUS → PHASER → DELAY → REVERB → OUTPUT
Sample-by-sample DSP · 8× oversampled amp stages · partitioned-FFT cabinet convolution · true stereo out
Motivation
Every person who plays guitar knows the routine: you need to boot up heavyweight software, load a plugin for amp and cabinet simulation, and wait. That software is great for professional studio work, but what if you just want to play your instrument without any complications? In addition, it's usually platform-locked, the licenses cost real money, and they limit how many devices you can authorize.
🎸 rusty-amp — a complete guitar amp and pedalboard rig that's a single ~1.5 MB binary. No installer. No license server. No subscription. No “activate this device”. You download one tiny file, plug in your guitar, and you're playing on any platform right in your terminal.
rusty-amp does not try to replace professional studio software.
What's important is that it doesn't cut corners on tone. Inside that tiny binary: amplifiers, multi-mic'd cabinets, and a full pedalboard, with artist-inspired presets to land a great tone. Under the hood, it's real DSP, not a toy. Each amp is modeled on the actual circuit, so the controls push and pull on each other the way they do on a real analog tone stack, and the low end “blooms” dynamically as you dig in, with the power amp and speaker interacting just like the real thing. The cabinets aren't just an EQ curve either. A real cab in a room has a “fingerprint”: its size, the cone resonance, the mic, and the early reflections. rusty-amp captures all of it as an impulse response, over a thousand taps long, so every reflection and resonance rings out, and the tone comes through deep and juicy instead of flat and sterile.
On top of that sit complex effects which add width and depth to sound. All of it runs in real time on a single audio thread, and the whole rig consumes only about 15% CPU, thanks to Rust, convolution, and FFT.
Highlights
3 amplifiers
Marshall JCM800, Mesa Dual Rectifier, and Randall Warhead — switchable while you play.
3 cabinets + your IRs
Mesa, Marshall, and Orange 4×12s, each captured with three blendable mics. Load your own .wav IR and A/B it live.
Full pedalboard
Gate, compressor, fuzz, Tube Screamer, DS-1, EQ, ping-pong delay, and stereo reverb. Add, remove, and bypass on the fly.
Studio-grade stereo
Wide, three-dimensional sound from the cab, delay, and reverb — a real L/R image, not a faked widener.
Ready-made presets
Instant tones inspired by Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, Death, Slipknot, and more.
CLAP plugin host
Drop a third-party CLAP effect into the chain and tweak its parameters without leaving the TUI.
AU amp host (macOS)
Load an Audio Unit amp sim — e.g. a Marshall plugin — as an amp-position override that replaces the built-in amp & cab, and A/B it live.
Built-in tuner
Press T for a chromatic tuner with a ±cents needle and a live note spectrum.
Practice metronome
Press M for an adjustable-tempo click you play along to — mixed into your monitor but never into your recordings.
One-key recording
Capture the fully-processed signal straight to a stereo WAV file with a single keystroke.
Hear it
Nothing is better than a showcase! DI guitar track — no re-amping, no post-processing, straight out of rusty-amp.
What you hear on first launch — stock knob positions, Tube Screamer, nothing else in the chain.
Warm glassy clean — gentle compression, edge-of-breakup gain, delay + hall reverb.
Lead tone — sustain-focused, delay + reverb, on-axis mic for pick-attack clarity.
Tight djent-adjacent rhythm and singing high-gain leads — Tube Screamer slamming the front end, pre-amp EQ tightening the chug.
Downtuned NOLA sludge — a massive low-mid wall of raw Marshall grind, Tube Screamer firming the drop tuning, cavernous Orange weight.
The other bundled presets are getting their own clips — check back.
The pedalboard
Eleven effects, each added, removed, and bypassed independently — the board shows only what you're using.
Amps & cabinets
- Marshall JCM800 — punchy, dynamic, touch-sensitive · dual 12AX7, passive FMV tone stack, tube sag.
- Mesa Dual Rectifier — compressed, aggressive, modern · triple gain stage, silicon sag.
- Randall Warhead — tight, crushing, solid-state · FET→BJT→rail-clip, active tone stack.
- Mesa 4×12 (V30) — scooped, aggressive, forward-projecting.
- Marshall 4×12 (Greenback) — warm, mid-forward, smooth top.
- Orange PPC412 (V30) — thick, chunky, closed-back birch.
- Load any
.wavimpulse response and A/B against the built-ins with X.
Quick start
Pre-built binaries have presets baked in — nothing else to download.
curl -L https://github.com/danylokravchenko/rusty-amp/releases/latest/download/rusty-amp-macos-aarch64 -o rusty-amp
chmod +x rusty-amp
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine rusty-amp # clear the unsigned-binary quarantine flag
./rusty-amp