Plug-In: Dumble® MegaPLX™

Dumble® MegaPLX™ amplifier profile.

All Dumble® amplifiers are rare beasts, and only a fortunate few will ever experience one in person. Now, the Dumble Preservation Society LLC is taking its first step into the digital realm, bringing more guitarists closer to that hand-wired Dumble tube experience with one of the rarest of them all: the Dumble® MegaPLX™.

Alexander Dumble built just three original MegaPLX™ amplifiers, each with its own unique specifications and interpretation of the “mega plexi” concept. Our latest MegaPLX™, serial 0006-03, is based on his original serial 0003, owned by the DPS team. Built using many NOS components from Alexander’s personal inventory, 0006-03 faithfully recreates the sound of that extraordinary amplifier.

This collection features five carefully captured MegaPLX™ settings, ranging from clean through crunch to rip-your-head-off distortion. Whether you’re already at home in the digital world or have yet to plug into a Dumble®, these captures offer an exciting opportunity to explore its character firsthand. The capture process also revealed just how complex the MegaPLX™ can be. With every knob turned up to 11, the amp reached a combination of gain, harmonics, and dynamic behavior that we weren’t able to faithfully capture using the NAM2 engine in our sessions. That setting gave us a fascinating glimpse into the challenges of translating an amplifier - especially one this extraordinary - into a digital form. It’s an exciting frontier to keep exploring and we are grateful for the tools and possibilities that TONE3000 and NAM2 bring to this journey.

We also encourage you to experiment with the “gain" control in the “Gateway" plugin. Push it up for more drive, or back it down to explore cleaner textures. We’ve found these adjustments to sound surprisingly natural, giving you room to shape each capture beyond its original setting. It’s a very cool benefit of the digital realm: a captured moment becomes a starting point for finding your own sound.

Also included is an impulse response of a 4×12 cabinet captured using a 25-watt Greenback speaker and supplied in four digital formats. The captures are designed for the open-source Neural Amp Modeler (NAM), with full instructions included in the ZIP file.

While we at DPS fundamentally believe that the ultimate guitar amplifier experience is a tube driven sonic and sometimes physical inspiration, digital has nonetheless earned its place as an option. And this is just the beginning of our digital journey. We look forward to bringing Dumble® fully into the digital realm in the future, sharing more of these remarkable amplifiers and the inspiration they offer with players everywhere. Thank you for your support!

The Dumble Preservation Society