TG Model Master

A guitar and bass amp and cabinet modeller for Windows, built so that a blind player can set up a tone without help and without guessing.

What it does

• Seventeen amp models, from clean American combos through British stacks to modern high gain, each with its own preamp voicing, tonestack and power section.
• Ten cabinet models, plus impulse response loading if you have your own.
• Stereo cabinet routing. Two cabinets, two positions, adjustable width. The signal stays mono through the amp — a guitar is one signal through one preamp — and splits at the cabinet, which is where it splits in a real rig.
• Effects: gate, chorus, delay, reverb, limiter, all stereo after the cabinet.
• A chromatic tuner accurate to within 0.03 cents from 30 hertz to 880 hertz.
• 299 factory presets, named so that typing an amp name finds everything it does.
• A direct input player, so you can audition models against the same riff without a guitar plugged in.

The parts that matter if you cannot see

This is the section other amp sims do not have.

Presets audition as you arrow through them. With 299 presets, pressing Enter on each one just to hear it defeats the point. Arrowing the list loads each preset as you land on it, debounced so holding the key down does not queue up work for presets you have already passed. The screen reader reads the row; the app deliberately does not speak over it.

Two keys to compare amps. Control plus Up and Control plus Down step through amp models from any page in the app, so A/B-ing seventeen models against one riff is a two-key operation rather than a trip through a menu.

Sliders sized to their range. Every slider takes between 28 and 200 key presses to cross, whatever it controls. This sounds like a small thing. It is not — before it was fixed, the high cut control spanned three thousand to sixteen thousand hertz at one hertz per press, which is thirteen thousand presses end to end, and ten presses in a row on some controls all announced the same number, which made the app feel broken when it was not.

Warnings on their own channel. Clipping and dropout alerts fire on a timer whether or not you did anything, so they land in the middle of whatever your screen reader is saying. Useful while you are setting a level; irritating while you are trying to navigate. They are a separate speech channel with their own toggle, so turning them off does not also silence preset names. They also do not interrupt — cutting off the control name your screen reader is halfway through is exactly what makes an unsolicited warning infuriating.

An impulse response browser that scales. Point it at your impulse response library and search it by name, pack or folder, multi-word and order independent. Every filter change announces the new result count, because a list silently re-filtering somewhere off screen tells a screen reader user nothing.

Measured, not claimed

• 5.3 milliseconds latency at a 256 sample buffer, 48 kilohertz, 21 percent CPU, zero dropouts
• Convolution exact to within 1.9 times ten to the minus fifteen against a reference implementation
• Reverb decay time within 2 percent of target on both channels
• Delay timing exact at every buffer size from 64 to 1024
• All seventeen models verified to produce measurably different output from the same input — no two identical, none silent

Requirements

Windows 10 or 11. Any audio interface; an ASIO device is recommended for low latency but not required.