HeadRush firmware 5.1.0 loads one NAM capture per rig, so every rig you build now starts with a decision about which amp deserves that slot. The release notes are blunt about it. You get one NAM A2 file, Full or Lite, or one NAM A1 file in Standard, Lite, Feather, or Nano size, and that is the whole allowance.
That sounds stingy until you look at what surrounds it. A Flex Prime rig holds 14 footswitch slots with amps, cabs, IRs, clones, and effects hanging off them, and the Prime and Core carry the same DSP power underneath. The capture is one voice in a much larger chain, not a replacement for it.
Stacking captures is not the constraint. Picking the right one is. Owners got the whole thing for nothing, which is still the part that surprises people about native NAM playback on HeadRush boards.
The captures worth burning the slot on are the ones with no factory equivalent. A specific late-sixties Bassman with tired filter caps. A hand-built boutique head that only ever existed in tiny numbers. A dirt pedal into a cranked amp, captured as a single unit, which HeadRush cannot assemble from separate blocks because the interaction is baked into the capture.
That last category is underrated. TONE3000 files pedals and outboard gear as their own capture type, and a fuzz slamming a small tweed sounds nothing like the two modeled separately. Capture the whole ugly thing. Then let the board handle delay and reverb, which it does perfectly well.
Load a bare head capture, plug into monitors, and it sounds thin and harsh. Not because the capture is bad. Because you are hearing a guitar amp with no cabinet, and nobody has ever wanted that sound.
Pair it with an impulse response, and it comes alive. HeadRush takes WAV and AIFF files up to 192 kHz and 32-bit, and Flex Prime lets you assign two IRs to one block, so you can blend a close-miked cab against a room capture the way an engineer would. TONE3000 hosts IRs for speaker cabinets, reverb, and real room acoustics alongside the amp files.
The shortcut, if you would rather not think about any of this, is to grab amp-and-cab captures and skip the pairing entirely. You lose the ability to swap speakers later. Plenty of players never want to.
Six points does not sound like much. It matters when the rig already carries a compressor, two drives, a modulation block, delay, reverb, and a stereo cab pair. That is a normal live rig, not an extreme one.
Run Full when the chain is simple, and the capture is doing the heavy lifting. Run Lite when the chain is dense, and you need the room for effects. The tonal gap between the two is smaller than the CPU gap, which is the useful thing to know before you start deleting blocks to make something fit.
Getting files onto the board takes three routes. You can browse TONE3000 through HeadRush Cloud on the touchscreen, drag .nam files across by USB, or sync them through Dropbox. Captures travel as standalone files or tucked inside a shared rig, so a friend can hand you a finished build with a single NAM block per rig already loaded and level-matched.
That last route saves real time. Someone else has already picked the capture, paired the IR, and set the output gain so the rig sits at the same volume as everything else on your board.
That sounds stingy until you look at what surrounds it. A Flex Prime rig holds 14 footswitch slots with amps, cabs, IRs, clones, and effects hanging off them, and the Prime and Core carry the same DSP power underneath. The capture is one voice in a much larger chain, not a replacement for it.
Stacking captures is not the constraint. Picking the right one is. Owners got the whole thing for nothing, which is still the part that surprises people about native NAM playback on HeadRush boards.
Spend the slot on the amp nobody has modeled
The Prime alone ships with more than 600 amp, cab, mic, and effect models, and the ReValver collection sits on top of that. Loading a capture of a mainstream British stack into your one slot wastes it. You are spending your rarest resource on something the board already does natively.The captures worth burning the slot on are the ones with no factory equivalent. A specific late-sixties Bassman with tired filter caps. A hand-built boutique head that only ever existed in tiny numbers. A dirt pedal into a cranked amp, captured as a single unit, which HeadRush cannot assemble from separate blocks because the interaction is baked into the capture.
That last category is underrated. TONE3000 files pedals and outboard gear as their own capture type, and a fuzz slamming a small tweed sounds nothing like the two modeled separately. Capture the whole ugly thing. Then let the board handle delay and reverb, which it does perfectly well.
An amp head capture is only half a tone
This trips up almost everyone on their first download. TONE3000 splits its library into amp-and-cab captures, taken from combos and stacks, and amp head captures taken from the head alone. The second kind has no speaker in it.Load a bare head capture, plug into monitors, and it sounds thin and harsh. Not because the capture is bad. Because you are hearing a guitar amp with no cabinet, and nobody has ever wanted that sound.
Pair it with an impulse response, and it comes alive. HeadRush takes WAV and AIFF files up to 192 kHz and 32-bit, and Flex Prime lets you assign two IRs to one block, so you can blend a close-miked cab against a room capture the way an engineer would. TONE3000 hosts IRs for speaker cabinets, reverb, and real room acoustics alongside the amp files.
The shortcut, if you would rather not think about any of this, is to grab amp-and-cab captures and skip the pairing entirely. You lose the ability to swap speakers later. Plenty of players never want to.
Full and Lite cost different amounts of headroom
A2 captures ship in two sizes from a single training run, and the difference shows up on your CPU meter. On HeadRush hardware, an empty rig sits near 7 percent. A full A2 model pushes that to roughly 30 percent. The Lite version of the same capture runs closer to 24 percent.Six points does not sound like much. It matters when the rig already carries a compressor, two drives, a modulation block, delay, reverb, and a stereo cab pair. That is a normal live rig, not an extreme one.
Run Full when the chain is simple, and the capture is doing the heavy lifting. Run Lite when the chain is dense, and you need the room for effects. The tonal gap between the two is smaller than the CPU gap, which is the useful thing to know before you start deleting blocks to make something fit.
Getting files onto the board takes three routes. You can browse TONE3000 through HeadRush Cloud on the touchscreen, drag .nam files across by USB, or sync them through Dropbox. Captures travel as standalone files or tucked inside a shared rig, so a friend can hand you a finished build with a single NAM block per rig already loaded and level-matched.
That last route saves real time. Someone else has already picked the capture, paired the IR, and set the output gain so the rig sits at the same volume as everything else on your board.
