Max Control® Stack

Max Control® Stack is amplifier (NAM A2) and guitar cabinet (IR) simulation software. It includes a signal chain with noise gate, pedal, amplifier, tone stack, parametric equaliser and cabinet — running entirely on a standard computer, as a standalone application or as a plugin inside a DAW. The amplifier stage is driven by NAM Architecture 2 (A2) captures — the open amp-capture format — so any amplifier profiled by the NAM community can be loaded into it as a .nam file.

Every stage is independently adjustable. The noise gate has adjustable knee, ratio, hysteresis and sidechain filter; the pedal stage sits in front of the amplifier with its own level and mix; a tone stack and a six-band parametric EQ with dynamic bands shape the response. The cabinet stage works by impulse response, loading .wav files of your own, the built-in library, or an online catalogue of maintained IRs — and a dry/wet mix allows the whole chain to run in parallel with the dry signal.

Presets can be selected over MIDI. Any knob or switch accepts a MIDI CC assignment from a right-click. A tuner is built in. The current version is available for Windows; future versions will also include macOS and Linux.