In March 2026, more than 1,000 guitarists sat through a blind listening test and submitted over 100,000 ratings. The free, open-source capture format at the center of it, Neural Amp Modeler’s new Architecture 2, was scored against Neural DSP’s captures, IK Multimedia’s ToneX and Line 6’s Proxy, and TONE3000 says A2 beat all three “by a wide margin”. That is a vendor’s own test, so read it with the usual squint. But one company clearly took it seriously: Fender.
In late October, Fender’s Chief Product Officer, Max Gutnik, posted on the official Tone Master Pro Users forum that NAM A2 support is coming to the Tone Master Pro. According to Guitar.com’s report on the post, the in-house team is testing it now, captures will sit in the signal chain like any other amp block, they will work from the touchscreen and the Pro Control app, and each one can carry its own graphic. The stated goal is to make the Tone Master Pro “an amazing platform to play NAM.”
The Tone Master Pro NAM news reads like a firmware feature. I think it is something bigger: Fender conceding that the amp model is no longer the product. The box is.
What a NAM capture is, and what it isn’t
Neural Amp Modeler is the work of Steve Atkinson, an AI researcher and guitarist who started it in 2019 and published it on GitHub; the first plugin that let players load captures into a DAW followed in 2022. The code is MIT-licensed and free. Anyone can point it at an amp, a pedal or a whole rig, train a model, and share the file. TONE3000, the community library built around the format, released A2 on June 2, 2026 in partnership with Atkinson.
The technical jump from A1 is real, by TONE3000’s numbers. Median error against the source gear fell from 0.0062 to 0.0033, the model “hears” about 132 milliseconds of signal instead of 85, and the full version runs 30 to 40% more efficiently than the old standard one. A smaller A2-Lite variant runs at 50% CPU on a 600 MHz ARM chip that costs about $3 in bulk, which is why A2 is landing on hardware at all. A1 was built to live inside a computer.
Here is the part the hype skips. A NAM capture is a snapshot. Gearnews puts it plainly: you get “a very high-resolution image of one setting of your amp/rig,” not a recreation of how the amp behaves across all its settings. Turn the treble knob on a captured Deluxe Reverb and you are adding EQ to a photograph, not moving a tone stack. Fender’s own Tone Master Pro amp models respond like the circuit does. That difference matters, and it is why the two will coexist rather than one replacing the other.
Fender was behind on capture, and this is the shortcut
When Fender launched the Tone Master Pro in late 2023 at $1,699.99, the pitch was Fender building its own amps in software, plus thousands of Fender-captured impulse responses. What it did not have was a way for players to bring in the sound of a specific amp sitting in their own room. Neural DSP’s Quad Cortex had capture. ToneX was built on it. Line 6 added Proxy. Fender’s library, which Guitar Player counted at around 30 amp models, was strong on Fender and thin everywhere else.
Players noticed. Noise Harmony reports that some owners were already forcing NAM profiles through the unit’s IR slots, a hack that voids the warranty. When your customers are voiding warranties to get a feature, the feature request has been filed.
Building a proprietary capture system in 2026 would mean years of catching up to formats players already own files for. Adopting NAM skips that. Overnight, the Tone Master Pro gains access to a library TONE3000 describes as hundreds of thousands of tones, most of them amps Fender would never license, and many of them boutique or one-off rigs nobody would ever model by hand.
And Fender is early. Guitar.com notes it is one of the first major modeler makers to commit to A2, ahead of Neural DSP, Line 6 and IK Multimedia. The format already runs on smaller hardware: gearnews lists HeadRush’s Prime, Core and Flex Prime among the units running A2-Full, and Blackstar’s BEAM Mini and Zoom’s Neurig also tap the TONE3000 library. Fender is the first name on that list that sells a flagship floor modeler and eight decades of amp heritage.
Why an open file format changes what you are paying for
I spent more than 20 years in IT operations at a large telecom, and the pattern here is one I watched play out with network gear over and over. Once a file format becomes a shared standard, vendors stop competing on who owns the format and start competing on who runs it best. Customers win, because their data stops being hostage to one box. Impulse responses went through exactly this a decade ago: once every modeler loaded a standard IR file, nobody bought a unit for its cabinet library anymore.
NAM pushes amp captures the same direction. If an A2 file of your friend’s plexi sounds the same on a Tone Master Pro, a HeadRush and a $230 Blackstar, then the capture is no longer the reason to choose any of them. What’s left to compete on is everything around it: the 7-inch touchscreen, the four effects loops, the footswitch layout, the scribble strips, how fast a preset changes mid-song, how cleanly the I/O handles a four-cable rig. Those are things the Tone Master Pro already does well, and they are what a working player actually touches on stage.
The quiet strategic bet is that Fender reportedly plans to keep releasing its own amp models alongside NAM. That is the right call. Captures give you breadth; Fender’s models give you knobs that behave. A gigging player probably wants a captured amp for the one tone they cannot get elsewhere and a fully adjustable ’65 Twin for everything else.
What Fender hasn’t said yet
There is a lot missing, and none of it is small.
No date. Gutnik’s post gives no release window. The most recent firmware on Fender’s support page is v1.8.58 from July 15, 2026, and its notes say nothing about NAM.
No price. Nobody has confirmed the update will be free. Given that NAM itself costs nothing, charging for it would land badly, but Fender has not said either way.
Full or Lite? Fender has not said whether the hardware will run A2-Full, A2-Lite or both, or how many capture blocks fit in a preset alongside its own models. On a box that already shares DSP between amps, cabs and effects, that answer decides whether NAM is a showpiece or a daily tool.
Player, not capturer. As reported so far, the Tone Master Pro will play A2 captures; creating your own still needs external software. That is fine if you just want the library. It is less useful if you were hoping to capture your own amp with the unit itself, the way a Quad Cortex owner can.
If you’re shopping for a modeler right now
The Tone Master Pro currently lists at $1,499.99 at Sweetwater, $200 under its launch price. If you already own one, this is the best news the unit has had since it shipped: a free-format library is coming, and the hacky IR workaround can go back in the drawer. If you are deciding between floor units, do not buy the Tone Master Pro on a promise with no date attached. Buy it if you like how it plays today, the touchscreen and switching, and treat NAM as the upgrade that lands later.
For anyone else, the bigger signal is the industry one. When the company that built the Twin Reverb decides your free, community-trained capture of a Twin Reverb deserves a slot in its flagship, the argument over who owns tone is mostly over. The players won it.
For more on where Fender’s modeling has gone since launch, see our original Fender Tone Master Pro coverage and Joe Bonamassa’s tubeless Tone Master ’59 Twin JB Edition.