Your tone lives on the track
Select a track and the plugin rack shows its effects as cards, in the order the signal passes through them, each with an on/off switch and its settings. Drag a card to reorder the chain.
SIGNALFORGE
Linux Music Workstation
A recording studio and a guitar rig in one native Linux application. Put an amp model and its effects on a track, play through them, and record. The take stays clean, so the tone can still change afterwards. Program drums in a step editor and hear them through a real kit. SignalForge runs on PipeWire and hosts the LV2, VST3 and CLAP plugins you already have.
Why SignalForge
Built around the track you are playing
Most of the time you are working on one instrument: its input, its sound, its takes. SignalForge keeps all of that on the track, and keeps the track the same wherever you look at it.
Record clean, decide later
A track's effects are heard while you play and on every take, but the recording stays dry. Change the amp next week and the takes you already have play through the new one.
One session, four views
Tracks, Mixer, Routing and Live Rig all look at the same session. Select a track in one and it is selected in all four; switching views never copies, converts or re-patches anything.
Plugins and tones
Find a sound, try it, keep it
Add plugin opens on the track you clicked it from. Its first tab, TONE3000, holds the complete TONE3000 plugin with its own amps, cabs and effects. My plugins lists the built-in effects, the LV2, VST3 and CLAP effects installed on your computer and everything you have kept, sorted into pedals, amps, cabs and other effects. TONE3000 tones searches the TONE3000 catalogue of amp models, pedals and cabs, signed in with your own account.
- Clicking a card only shows what it is. Nothing is downloaded and the track does not change until you add or try it.
- Try puts a plugin on the track on trial, so you can play your instrument through it before you decide to keep it.
- Saving the project copies downloaded models into its folder, so the session takes its tones with it.
- Every plugin opens in its own editor, in a window sized to fit it, or as a slider per parameter when it has none.
Drums
Program a beat, hear a real kit
A drum track plays its MIDI through a DrumGizmo kit you have downloaded, with the kit's mics grouped into drum buses for the mixer. The drum editor opens a drum clip as a grid of named lanes, docked under the arrangement or full screen under the transport, so a pattern can play while you edit it.
- Play hits in from a pad kit, or draw them in the step or free-time grid, then shape velocity, timing and feel.
- Song drums builds a whole song from one of fourteen styles: intro, verses, choruses and fills, as clips you can edit one by one.
- Pick a kit from your library, with its variations, favourites and recently used kits, and Listen to the clip through it before you choose it.
- Import a Standard MIDI File and send each part to a new drum track, a new MIDI track or one you already have.
The tour
Four views of one session
Every view goes full screen with F11 when you want to play rather than set up. Tracks and Mixer open compact, with Large rows and Large strips when you want room, and Super compact in Tracks folds every track but the one you are working on to a thin row.
Tracks
Record, arrange and edit. Every take lands on a layer of its own, with its own mute, solo and level, so you can stack takes and audition them before you assemble a part. Clips move, trim and fade without touching the audio file, and the Range tool edits inside one clip or across tracks. The plugin rack docks under the timeline.
Mixer
Faders, peak meters, pan, mute and solo on every strip, with buses and sends behind them. A DrumGizmo kit gets a strip of its own and one for each drum bus, the built-in noise gate keeps its controls on its strip, and other plugins open from the strip that carries them.
Routing
The session as a graph: tracks, plugins, buses and your devices, joined by cables you drag between ports. Audio and MIDI ports are coloured apart, ports that cannot connect dim while you drag, and the mouse wheel zooms around the pointer. Default output picks the device new projects play through.
Live Rig
The selected instrument, ready to play through: effect editor, tuner, bypass, model and cab IR, effect presets, saved rigs and the instrument level, all on the same chain the other views show.
What's in the box
Recording
Every take on a layer of its own, loop takes on drum tracks, click with count-in and accent, and input monitoring through the track's effects.
Editing
Non-destructive trims, fades in five shapes, crossfades, clip gain, polarity, gain envelopes and normalise, with undo and redo across the session.
Amp modelling
The complete TONE3000 plugin, NAM amp models and cab IRs through the NeuralRack plugin, TONE3000 browsing with your own account, and the x42 tuner on a parallel tap.
Plugin hosting
LV2, VST3 and CLAP effects and instruments, each in its own editor, plus a built-in noise gate.
MIDI
MIDI tracks driving instrument plugins, a note editor, Standard MIDI File import, automation with read, write, touch and latch, and MIDI learn for the controller you already have.
Drums
Drum tracks played by DrumGizmo kits, a drum editor with step and free-time grids, a pattern library, and whole songs of drums built from a style.
Mixing
Buses, sends, pan, mute and solo, and a peak meter on every strip.
Bake and export
Print a track through its chain, or export a mix or stems to WAV, FLAC, AIFF, MP3, Ogg or Opus, or capture in real time when the path runs through outboard gear.
Projects
Templates to start from, autosave with recovery, relinking when media has moved, and a default output device for new projects.
Room to work
Full screen for any view and for the drum editor, and compact, super compact and large rows and strips that stay the way you left them.
PipeWire native
Talks to the Linux audio graph directly, so your devices and other audio applications appear in Routing by name.
Early access
Everything on this page is in the application and works today. SignalForge is still young, though: it runs on Linux only, you build it from source, and it has not yet been qualified against a range of audio interfaces, so treat behaviour that depends on your particular device as unproven until you have tried it.
Get SignalForge
Build it, open a project, play
# first time only: fetch the build toolchain
$ python3 prototypes/phase01/bootstrap.py
# build
$ ./tools/build.sh
# launch
$ ./tools/run-desktop.sh
# or look around with no audio device
$ ./tools/run-desktop.sh --offlineWhat you need
- A Linux desktop running PipeWire.
- X11 or XWayland, which plugin editors open in.
- For amp models and cab IRs, the NeuralRack LV2 plugin; for the Tuner button, the x42 tuner; for drum kits, the DrumGizmo LV2 plugin and a kit of your own.
- For the TONE3000 catalogue, your own TONE3000 account. SignalForge does not include or redistribute its models.
Run the commands from the top of the source folder. The user guide takes you from the first launch to a finished render; Run locally lists every launch option.