The Web is a Guitar Amp Now (Literally)

When I shared a draft of this blog post with a colleague, they understandably assumed it would be a metaphor. I assure you it is quite literal: The Web is a guitar amp now.

The Web has always been an extraordinary platform. It’s flexible enough to be the home to a collaborative encyclopedia, massive multiplayer online games, and recipes - lots of recipes.

The core capabilities of the web platform have grown over the past few decades in ways I could never have imagined back in 1999. Even so, the web had lagged behind native mobile (and sometimes desktop) apps in some capabilities. Developers have been chipping away at these limitations of the web platform, gradually adding things like camera access, bluetooth access, orientation, and push notifications.

I still marvel that our design team uses a completely web-based design tool (in Figma) as our primary design tool. Something I thought would always need to be a native app. And it’s not just ‘as-good-as’ native desktop app equivalents. In many ways, it’s better.

This week I learned of an application that is a crowning achievement for the engineers and architects of the Web platform:

You can play your guitar through a website now.

The Tone3000 website introduced a new feature where you can play a guitar through their website (or bass, or any other source through an audio interface). You’ll hear a remarkably accurate simulation of one of thousands of ‘captured’ amplifiers and effects back through your headphones or speakers.

This delightful feature is a result of open source tech triumphs on several fronts:

• Steve Atkinson’s open-source Neural Amp Modeller (NAM) project allows capture and playback of guitar/bass amps, speakers, and effects at a level of quality rivaling commercial products costing thousands of dollars (and NAM is free!).
• The Tone3000 website is a community-powered collection of ‘captures’ of amps and gear. People are using NAM to capture gear (often priceless vintage gear we’d never otherwise have access to) and sharing the captures for others to play through (again, for free).
• The Web Audio API allows browsers to access audio inputs and outputs, like an audio interface (the little box nerds like me use to plug our guitars into our computers), and our speakers and headphones for output.
• The WebAssembly (wasm) allows low-level (fast) code to be compiled and run in a web browser at speeds comparable to native code.

Some awesome folks put all of these building blocks together on the Tone3000 site, and now I can plug my guitar into my computer, play it through the site, and hear what sounds amazingly close to a vintage 1965 Fender Deluxe Reverb guitar amp.

It’s worth repeating: You can play your guitar through a website.