RedPawAmp: a free Friedman IR-X amp sim

We, Darwin’s Cat, are collecting our favourite guitar sounds. The boutique sound of Friedman is one of them. It is on many of our studio recordings. We very much hope it finds its place in yours too, and that you get to know and love the sound of the Friedman BE-100.

We gave RedPawAmp to one favourite amp on purpose. We don’t like it when dozens of models and endless options get in the way of playing. So we polished a sound we enjoy playing ourselves, and added reverb, delay and a cabinet simulator (IR), so you can use it without other plugins and fit it to your track. A favourite sound, and nothing extra.

People often say Friedman is "Marshall on steroids", and we think that is exactly right.

Friedman is an American brand of guitar tube amps, founded by the designer Dave Friedman. For years he worked on the gear of Eddie Van Halen, Steve Stevens and Jerry Cantrell. Repairs, setup, mods built to order. Friedman put his huge experience with artists on real stages into his own line of amps.

Friedman took the Marshall circuit as a starting point and tuned it to his own taste. The amp sounds even more Marshall than the original Marshall, and responds to the knobs far more predictably. It gives more gain with less noise. It gives better note definition. In our humble opinion its sound sits in a mix more easily without further processing, and that is why we value this marvel of engineering and experience.

Friedman Amplification is a very small private company: Dave designs the amps himself, checks how each one sounds personally and signs the finished units. Boutique Amps Distribution builds them.

Dave Friedman himself says the IR-X is a full tube preamp in pedal format. Inside are two 12AX7 tubes, running at full high voltage. In essence it is the physical circuit of the BE-100 preamp.

RedPawAmp is a free amp sim of exactly this device, captured in NAM. More about the IR-X itself in our Friedman IR-X review.

Channel 1: Clean / Crunch. A British sound in the spirit of the Marshall Plexi: from a clean, bright and transparent tone to a warm, rough crunch. Open, dynamic, sensitive to the pick attack. Good for blues, classic rock and light hard rock. This is the BE-100’s Plexi channel; with firmware 2.0 the IR-X got a separate Plexi mode in it, closer still to the original. The three-position Bright switch controls the brightness, and brings the guitar forward in a dense mix when needed.

Channel 2: Overdrive / High Gain. The overdrive of the Friedman BE, the famous Brown Eye: a dense, saturated, aggressive British sound with strong mids, good note definition and long sustain. From 80s hard rock to modern metal. The Tight position makes the low end tighter and punchier, which helps a lot when recording rhythm guitars, and Fat adds fullness, weight and that punch in the chest.

Turbo / Boost is an extra mode of each channel. Gain Boost adds drive, saturation and sustain, and Volume Boost gives a separate volume level, for example to lift a solo in the mix. On the second channel the IR-X’s boost gives the gain structure of the even heavier HBE mode, the Hairy Brown Eye. Two channels with Turbo on or off give four main sounds.

For the captures we used NAM A2, the latest generation of Neural Amp Modeler networks. We captured our own Friedman IR-X on professional gear: the signal leaves a Focusrite Clarett+ 4Pre audio interface, goes through a Radial JCR Studio Reamper into the IR-X’s input, and from its output back into the same Clarett+. Bass, Middle and Treble stay in the middle, at 12 o’clock, the whole time, and the IR-X’s built-in power amp emulation is on: hence PowerAmp in the pack’s name.

We captured the Gain knob at nine positions: 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 o’clock. At 7 and 8 o’clock the 9 o’clock capture plays. The DRIVE knob switches between the captures or blends neighbouring ones smoothly.

We captured the Bright, Tight and Fat modes, each with and without Boost.

In total, 54 captures of the first channel and 32 of the second. Every network was trained for 1000 epochs. The ESR error is between 0.0008 and 0.006 on the first channel and between 0.003 and 0.012 on the second. The training curve of every capture is on the Friedman IR-X pack page.

Tuner: a built-in guitar tuner.

Noise Gate: a gate that learns, to silence the noise of your guitar rig.

Peak Limiter: a safety peak limiter that protects the output from sudden peaks.

EQ: the BASS, MIDDLE, TREBLE tone stack comes from the device itself: we measured its curves. The HPF and LPF filters are ours, to control the low and high ends of the spectrum.

Cabinet Simulator: a guitar cabinet simulator based on impulse responses (IR). It comes with our own impulses of our beloved Orange PPC212V.

There are six reverb types. Each has its own character; the genres below are pointers, not limits.

Plate: a dense, smooth reverb in the spirit of classic studio units. For rock guitars and solos that need space and an expressive tail. This is our default reverb.

Ambience: a short, unobtrusive space. A good starting point for metal and tight rhythm guitars, when you want more space without long reverb tails.

Hall: a spacious concert-hall reverb with a long tail. For atmospheric clean sounds, ballads and long solos.

Spring: the typical spring reverb of old guitar amps. For vintage rock, blues, rockabilly and surf.

Plate, Ambience, Hall and Spring should be fully enough for guitar, but we added two more:

Room: the natural feel of a small room. A versatile choice for blues, rock and clean sounds that need a little air and a live space.

Modulated: a reverb with a modulated tail that makes a soft, shifting space. For ambient, psychedelic rock and atmospheric guitar parts.

Delay: an echo synced to the tempo. In the plugin it follows the host (DAW); in the standalone app you can tap the tempo with Tap Tempo.

Undo / Redo let you take changes back and bring them back again, so you can experiment with the sound without fear of losing a good setting.

The A/B/C/D system gives four independent settings to compare. Each has its own full change history with Undo / Redo. You can switch between them and go back steps in each one without touching the others.

The standalone version supports MIDI control, so you can run the amp from external controllers.

RedPawAmp is also a Mars rover. Instead of the usual amp panel you sit in the cockpit of a research rover driving across the surface of Mars. Outside the windscreen is a 3D world, rendered in real time with OpenGL. The rover’s speed depends on the channel and on Turbo: the more aggressive the sound, the faster the ride.

You can steer across Mars with the keyboard or the mouse. And with some luck you will meet the most famous Mars rovers on the way.

The screen of the onboard radio shows the sound in real time. There are five display modes: Spectrum, Wave, Shape, Envelope and Transfer, from the spectrum and the waveform to its envelope and transfer curve. Shape deserves a special mention: in real time you can see the sound before the amp and after it.

In the standalone app RedPawAmp listens to every enabled MIDI input on all sixteen channels.

A controller that counts programs from zero sends 0, 1, 2 and 3 for them. In a DAW the gears, TURBO and the knobs are switched by automation.

RedPawAmp is free and will stay free. If you like it: feed the Cat

Friedman and IR-X are trademarks of their owner. We are not affiliated with them and name the device only to say what we captured.