British Valve Custom (BVC)

I appreciate free stuff, but this falls well short of HyBrit by LePou, Mercuriall's Marshall preamps, or even Marshall emulation that comes with free edition of Guitar Rig. Isn't responsive, hard to clean up the sound and built in cab sim limits its versatility.

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This one is growing on me as I like what it does to the sound of my Tele. It's not too configurable, but it does a great job to sound like a tube amp. The appearance is good - not reminiscent of any other amps, but that is good, it has it's own look.

There aren't too many features, but you don't need them. The sounds is great and I for one don't feel the need to play with it too much, it sounds great out of the box. It's definitely got tube amp written all over it, and it just makes me want to rock out rather than do anything else. Having said that, it also has other uses, and I've used the out of phase sounds on my single coils with the gain turned down to get a really great sounding funk groove going.

There is a manual on the website, but I haven't had any contact with the company. It's stable and all you need to know is where your guitar lead plugs in.

As a free version of the full product this definitely gets a 10. I'm considering buying the full version which is a steal at $79. Read more

This is a great free tube amp modeller. It only models one amp, and doesn't have a huge amount of control, so it won't be useful for every project, but the sound quality is great for what it does (it certainly is up there as one of the best freeware amp modellers). Its based on a Marshall amp and gives some good heavy sounds. I wasn't able to get much I liked in the way of clean or crunch sounds though.

The gain and drive work together to control the amount of distortion, while the four other controls serve as a basic EQ.

I needed to put a noise gate before-hand to stop it amplifying the noise from my guitar, and you will probably want to add your own reverb / delays etc afterwards as it has no built in effects. Cabinet modelling is not necessary, as this has already been taken account of (apparently a 4x12 cabinet emulation is included).

It doesn't come with any presets, but there isn't too much to tweak so its easy to explore. It serves as a great advert for their commercial more fully featured amp modeller. Read more