Community Pack for a really cool amp of mine, full pack is available here: https://ko-fi.com/s/0a8fcce63a
Description of full pack:
Ashen Tempest Vol. 1: "The Sag" [Updated 2 August to contain the most recent RigSculpt Workshop analytics.]
Loose, bright, and dynamic. The saggy lead voice of my Mark IV Rev A.
Try before you buy: A free, trimmed-down sampler (the Artificer Pack) is on Ko-Fi (ko-fi.com/s/c1cac0523f) and bundled with my free plugin RigSculpt. Grab it, load a few, and see how they feel before you spend a cent.
What this is
37 neural amp models (or, as some say, captures or snapshots of your reamp chain), captured from my Mesa Boogie Mark IV Rev A (1990). Trained as A2 from the original audio, at 48 kHz. This is the saggy, dynamic side of the Mark IV: bright, loose, and touch-reactive, where my Mark IV Rev B pack (Onyx Tempest) is tight and modern. Mostly a cleans-and-leads pack, built around that spongy high-gain feel.
Amp captures, no cab. There is no cabinet, microphone, or cab IR baked into these. What you get is the amp itself, including how it interacts with the load and DI chain I list below, and nothing past the amp's output. You bring the cab (see "What you need to run these").
The voice (measured, not guessed)
Across all 37 the fingerprint is bright and dynamic on top of a big low end. A forward, aggressive treble sits over scooped mids and a deep low end (low-versus-high balance around +14 dB, down to roughly 43 Hz), with the air above rolled well back so the brightness stays focused rather than fizzy. Breakup is early and generous, saturation runs hot, and the feel is the story: RigSculpt Workshop reads 28 of the 37 as Saggy hi-gain, the spongy, touch-reactive response this revision is loved for. The dominant voice is bright saggy lead. You do not have to take my word for the tone. It is measured and visible on every file.
What's inside (37 captures, 48 kHz)
4 cleans (sparkle and headroom)
28 lead voices, the heart of the pack: bright and saggy, from mid-forward to scooped, with the dynamic touch response front and center
5 fully saturated "crush" tones
This pack skips the middle ground on purpose. It is a cleans-and-high-gain set, the two places this amp sings, not an even sweep through crunch. Every stage I dialed and kept, from about 13 percent drive up to the head fully cranked.
Made for the free tools I built
RigSculpt Workshop and RigSculpt are freeware. I give them away, they are downloadable right here on my Ko-fi, and the full field guide lives at conversantsoundworks.com/rigsuite-guide.html. My hope is that this way of working with captures catches on. What it means for you: every .nam in this pack already carries a full RigSculpt Workshop analysis block, so the moment you drop the folder in, the library does the work you would otherwise do by hand:
a measured EQ curve and drive/THD response you can see, not guess at
archetype and sub-flavor tags, a sonic fingerprint, and "find similar," so 37 captures stay instantly navigable
one-click voicing and drive matching in RigSculpt, plus amp-to-cab pairing
No spreadsheet, no re-analysis, no setup. Each file still works on its own in the original Neural Amp Modeler plugin or other NAM-compatible software. These just arrive ready to be a library you can play through, not a pile of files to dig past.
How I capture:
The load: Depending on the amp, either a real reactive speaker load into a Rupert Neve Designs DI (to my neighbors' dismay) for authentic speaker interaction, or top-tier loadboxes, mostly the RedSeven Amp Central EVO, with the Suhr Reactive Load on a few.
A word on calibration for this pack: Ashen Tempest comes from my earlier capturing days, before I built the null-test process my newer packs use. I still set the reamp level carefully and kept it consistent across the whole pack, a +8 dBu interface reference on every one of the 37 files, so they sit together and compare cleanly. What I will not claim here is the measured, null-tested-against-straight-in process I run now. If that process matters to you, my Mark IIC+, Mark IV Rev B, and Friedman packs were all captured with it. I kept this one in the catalog because the tones are worth having, and I would rather tell you exactly how it was made than dress it up as something it is not.
Hitting these the way I captured them:
Each file carries a +8 dBu input-calibration value, my interface's reference level at the time. That is not a target to dial in, and it is not the voltage at the amp jack. It is stored so a NAM plugin can line your rig up with mine. To match my captures, set your own interface for clean headroom, input gain at minimum so nothing clips, and run your plugin's input-calibration feature, which asks for your interface's level and corrects for the difference. RigSculpt reads the stored value and handles it for you, and the original Neural Amp Modeler plugin has a Calibration step. The point is to calibrate the difference between your rig and mine, not to copy my number.
What you need to run these:
A cabinet IR turns an amp capture into a finished tone. RigSculpt ships with cab IRs I made so you can play right away, and RigSculpt Workshop lets you reshape those into your own cab voicing. Prefer to source your own? There are plenty of free IRs on Tone3000. No cab is baked into these captures by design, so the speaker choice stays yours.
How to read the names:
Every file reads MKIVA | Ashen Tempest | voicing gain number, for example MKIVA | Ashen Tempest | Saggy Thick Lead 002. The voicing words are measured relative to this amp's own average, so the name tells you how each capture differs from its siblings, not just a generic label.
Compatibility:
Standard .nam model files, A2 architecture, 48 kHz. Tested in the original Neural Amp Modeler plugin and in RigSculpt. They should also load in other NAM-compatible software and hardware that reads standard .nam models, though those two are the ones I have verified myself.
An honest note on what this is:
These capture my rig: the amp, yes, but also the load, the DI, the reamp chain, and the settings I chose chasing the sounds in my head. They are made to hand you my Ashen Tempest tones, faithfully, not to pretend they replace the amp itself. If you want the real head in the room, buy the amp. If you want the sounds I pulled out of mine, they are right here. And a small handful of these also live in my free sampler (the Artificer Pack), so you may already own a few. The rest are exclusive to this volume.
About me:
I came to captures wanting to keep my favorite amp sounds without hauling the amps, and wanting to trust that what I captured was really what the amp did. Chasing both honestly is what led me to build RigSculpt Workshop and RigSculpt, and to give them away. I would rather ship sounds you can find, see, and trust than a thousand you have to dig through.
Refunds:
These are digital downloads, available immediately, so purchases are normally non-refundable once downloaded, except where the law requires otherwise or the files turn out to be faulty or not as described. That is exactly why the free Artificer sampler exists: try it first, then decide.
About the name, the thumbnail, and trademarks:
The nickname on this pack, Ashen Tempest, is my own, not the amp's model name, and that is deliberate. It marks the distance between the amplifier itself and this product, which is a capture of my whole signal chain and settings, not the bare amp.
The amp shown in the thumbnail is rendered from a photograph I took of my own Mesa Boogie Mark IV Rev A, the actual head used in the reamp chain for these captures. It is there only to state, as a matter of fact, which amp was captured. Mesa/Boogie and Mark IV are trademarks of their respective owners. I am not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Mesa/Boogie, and no such association is implied.
The amp is also only one piece of any capture. A .nam is a snapshot of a whole reamp chain and a set of choices: my amp settings, dialed to my own taste with my own guitars and pickups in mind (spanning several styles, but by no means all of them), a speaker impedance load and DI box or a reactive loadbox, my interface and reamp path, and every other link in that chain. For that reason this product is in no way meant to imply that it lets you replicate the experience of owning and dialing in the amp itself. It hands you the specific sounds I pulled from my rig, not the amp.
