Kemper Profiler

Christoph Kemper had already designed the Access Virus synth when his company in Recklinghausen, Germany, released the Profiling Amplifier in 2011. The trick was to skip circuit analysis altogether. You mic up your own amp, patch the Profiler in, and it fires noise and tones through the chain, listens to what comes back and nudges its internal model until the difference is small. The result, a "rig", is a file of a few kilobytes.

Rigs quickly became a commodity: studios sold captures of their most expensive amps, and touring guitarists left the tube heads at home. The method captures one setting at a time, though — turn a knob and you hear the model's best guess, not the original.