For the past two years I've had a living situation where I couldn't play guitar at all, and now I do, but in that time I continued building up the mountainous stock pile of endless IRs and amp sims from the sister site as well as countless profiles for Neural Amp Modeler and quite a few for Tonex as well.

Any tips for organizing all of these and wading through them efficiently to get to what you want, etc? I'm finding my jam sessions bogged down by endless tone chasing. I am starting to delete IRs and NAMs that don't click quickly.

Also any tips for dealing with how every IR company seems to have different standards for their IRs? I've deleted all but 48kHz IRs and that definitely helped trim the fat, but still they're all at different times and volumes and such that it's annoying.

(Bonus question: who's using Tonex effectively from sister site out there nowadays? I use R2R everything but I've seen that TCD will load some profiles shared that R2R's will not, dunno if I want to mix R2R and TCD IK Multimedia stuff, IDK.

If it matters at all, I'm not into heavy tones at all. Clean, crunch, edge of breakup, medium gain, etc.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jun 8, 2026 at 9:51 PM

I organize most IRs by manufacturer, like Eminence, Celestion, Ampeg, etc...With NAMS I group them in folders like Marshall, Peavey, PRS, etc...

 

So this is what I did ... I deleted everything, then I chose a core group of amps that I would actually use and researched the best IR for each amp model. Then I built some FX chains around these amps. Now I am happy, sleep great, and make lot's of music.

PS I use as much NAM as I can and everything else is VST.

 

Last edited: Jun 9, 2026 at 12:20 AM

I've considered this route as well, or storing everything on a separate hard drive and only bringing in a bit at a time... care to share what your favorite IR brands are? Or are you getting them from users on tone 3000?

 

What is this word you use "organization" ? I read many times about the "concept of organization" but I've never really seen it in the wild..
It sounds familiar, but.. CubeDude

 

I would separate the process from making music. Spend a couple of hours going through them, tagging favourites, deleting ones you aren't keen on - set a high bar for that, don't keep those you're not sure about. Also be sure to try different guitar knob settings because that's often where the magic tone you're looking for lies. I would also do this whole process more than once because we hear differently on different days. Eventually you'll settle on a handful that will work with everything.

 

I used to have >1000, then I deleted everything but my ~90 favourite/most authentic speaker-cab combos. These days I'm effectively down to 12-16. I cross-blend between those 12-16 in an XY-IR mixer plugin (Pulse 2, IRDX Studio, Cabinetron, MCabinet, ...). No option paralysis, but infinite (meaningful) choices.

 

One think I find interesting as well is how ToneX peforms lately.
I know that both the quality and (no)business model of NAM are better. But if memory serves last comments I saw said that ToneX does quite well with less CPU.

 

NAM A2 has changed the game.

 

Yeah I agree with Zen, NAM A2 has changed the landscape, but Tonex has some specific models and such that NAM doesn't have which keeps me going back to it.

 

Regarding guitar tone it's also important to see the bigger picture. If you look at a typical guitarist they are using one or two amps, and all the knobs are set and forget. The amp sound is manipulated with FX pedals and the values on them rarely change, so they are just turning them on or off. Additional sound manipulation is available on the guitar via the volume and tone controls and the pickup selector switch. The player may even change guitars during a performance to get a different type of sound (humbucker, P90, single-coil, etc). It is fairly easy to mimic this process with profile captures, so our time is probably better spent improving our playing technique, as our fingers and touch are also tone monsters!

 

Last edited: Jun 9, 2026 at 10:15 PM