Plug a real guitar into your phone and get a great amp, a board of pedals, and a room to play in. Walk into any shop, plug into any guitar, and your sound is already with you.
Which is why a rig is so hard to carry. The guitar travels fine; the amp, the pedals and the room don't. So you practise into headphones that sound like nothing, or you leave the good sound at home and play something you don't recognise.
D–65 puts the other half in your pocket. Wire a guitar in through any interface and you land in a real amp — not a menu of thirty of them. One blackface combo, modeled to the component level, with the spring tank underneath and the tremolo breathing ahead of the clip. Push past 5 and the power section gives the way it should: supply sag first, then grit. That push is the amp, not a pedal.
Then the board teaches you what pedals actually do, because you can hear the order change. Fuzz into compressor is a different animal than compressor into fuzz, and you learn that by dragging a tile, not by reading about it.
And the tape never stops rolling, so you print the good part after you played it — the take you weren't recording is already behind you. Sit down anywhere with headphones and the rig is set up. Walk into a shop, plug into a guitar you've never held, and it's still your sound.
“The tape is always rolling — so you print the good part after you play it, not before.”
— the D–65 field manual
The blackface Deluxe is the most recorded amp in history for a reason, and the Telecaster bolted the neck on. D–65 keeps that heritage honest — then hands you a board the hardware never had room for.
Not a re-creation — a continuation. If you love the hardware, you'll feel at home here; learn here, and the hardware will feel like home too.
The whole manual ships inside the app — the folded sheet in the amp's tolex pocket. Tap the wordmark.
The board you buy is finished: amp, compressor, overdrive, fuzz, chorus, delay and the looper. That's the $9.99, and it never changes. Nobody buys D–65 and finds a demo.
Then, once a month, something new lands on the shelf — $4.99, à la carte, yours the moment you take it. Skip three and take the fourth. It isn't a subscription and there's nothing to miss; a pedal you didn't buy in March is still there in December. The pedals are where the cadence starts — as the shop can keep up, the other instruments get drops of their own: kits for the sampler, patch banks for the synth, reels for the deck.
These are the strange ones — the boxes you'd never drop three hundred dollars on just to find out. A quartz gate built from a 1969 Tokyo chronograph. A mineral spring that holds you under and vents a geyser when you let go. Forty kilometers of camel-stride tremolo across a stereo desert. Five dollars to find out whether a strange idea is your new sound.
And none of it is only for guitar. Run a vocal through the fuzz, a synth pad through the springs, a drum loop through the chronograph — D–65 is an effects rack that happens to have a great amp in it. Every pedal is drawn to the same standard as the faceplate: real knobs, real lettering, a lamp that means something. A pedal should be worth looking at while you use it.
A quartz gate from the Tokyo chronograph, 1969. The week is the pattern — lit days pass signal, dark days close the gate, quartz-steady.
The Jacumba soak — mineral water at 95°F. Press the water and it holds you under; let go and the spring vents a geyser. It trails through bypass.
Forty kilometers a day. Pace is the camel's stride, sway leans the stereo field, mirage is the oud's twin string rising to full heat-haze.
A place or an object, rendered as DSP and a faceplate. If one sends you off to buy the real thing, it worked. The calendar grows with the shop.
The point isn't the pedal — it's that five dollars buys you a new idea, and the exploration is worth more than the price.
The deck's crate key sends a take straight to the tape machine — it lands on T–6's FROM D–65 shelf before you get there.
On T–6's patchbay the two input channels each run through their own D–65 — guitar on one strip, vocal on another, never smeared together.
Rigs and takes file onto the library; L–1 hands a rig back to the amp that made it, on any device.
One new pedal a month, $4.99, à la carte and permanent. The drops point outward — deeper into pedals and real gear, never instead of them.
Also an Audio Unit — aufx · d65f — the board and head in the plugin window, factory rigs included.
The amp and the full board — compressor, overdrive, fuzz, chorus, delay, looper — complete on its own. $9.99 on the App Store covers iPhone and iPad; the Mac app and AUv3 are $29.99, or $79 for the whole Rack. What you pay builds the next machine.
$9.99 at release. Free to test right now — leave your email and we'll send you a build.
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