- Getting started
- Your library and songs
- Setlists
- Stage
- Foot controller
- Audio
- The plugin
- Account, credits and plans
- Troubleshooting
Getting started
Sign in with TONE3000. It is free, it is where the captures come from, and it is what carries your library and your plan between your phone, your tablet and the plugin.
Plug in
You need an audio interface — anything class-compliant over USB-C, an iRig HD X being the cheap and obvious one. Guitar into the interface, interface into the device, headphones out of the interface. Then tap Plug In: that opens the audio device, and you should hear yourself straight away.
The board
What you play through is a signal chain: a row of blocks in the order the signal meets them — pedals, then the amp, then the cab and whatever sits after it. Some blocks are ordinary effects. The amp and drive blocks are neural captures: recordings of how one real piece of gear behaves, made by people and hosted on TONE3000. Tap a block to bypass it, open it for its controls, or swap its capture for a different one.
Name a song
Type an artist and a song. CAPO — the part of ManifesTone that builds rigs — reads what is known about that record, picks the captures, puts the chain in the right order, sets the controls and tells you why it chose what it chose. Then you play. If it is not quite the sound in your head, say so in plain words and it adjusts.
Tone credits
Every rig carries a TONE CREDITS sheet: each capture in the chain, who made it and under what licence. Copy it in one tap and paste it into your video description or your sleeve notes. The people who made these captures gave them away; crediting them costs you nothing.
Your library and songs
Save a rig and it lands in your library, filed under the artist and the song rather than under a name you have to invent. Search by either.
Parts
One song usually needs more than one sound. A part — clean, rhythm, lead — is its own rig saved against the same song. The library shows them as a single row with a chip per part, so a song stays one thing in the list no matter how many sounds it takes. Tap a chip to load that part.
To mark an existing rig as a part, either long-press its chip in Stage and choose Mark this rig as, or set the part in the save sheet when you save it. A rig with no part set is the full song.
Previous and Next always move by song and never between parts — so a stray stomp mid-song cannot drop you into the wrong verse. Parts are changed with the chips, or with a footswitch you assign yourself.
Setlists
A setlist is one row per song, in the order you will play them. Adding a song adds the song; adding a chip pins one specific part, which is what you want when a song only ever gets played clean.
Press Play on the set and it opens Stage at the first song. From then on Previous and Next walk the set rather than your library. To jump, tap the song pill and pick any song in the set.
Stage
Stage is the full-screen view for playing: no lists, no menus, nothing to read. Open it from the play button in the header, or by playing a setlist.
What is on screen:
- The song pill at the top — the artist and song you are on. Tap it to pick another; it is also where Exit lives.
- Part chips beneath it. Tap to switch part; long-press for the part menu, including Bind to a footswitch.
- The signal chain. Tap a block or a capture pedal to bypass it. Long-press one for Settings or Bind to a footswitch.
- LEVELS, a fold you open when you need input and output, and ignore when you do not.
- The switch tiles along the bottom — what your foot controller is doing on this rig right now. They are tappable, so you can work the whole rig with a finger before a pedal is anywhere near it.
Stage plugs in on its own: open it and it opens the audio device for you. The tuner is silent — it mutes your output and lays a tuner over the screen, so you can tune between songs without the room hearing it. Leave with Exit, top right.
Foot controller
Pairing
For a Bluetooth MIDI pedal: Settings › Foot controller › Scan, then pick it from the list. A BLE pedal only advertises while it is not connected to anything else, so if it does not appear, disconnect it from the laptop or the other tablet first. Once paired, the app reconnects that controller when it opens, and it only goes looking while audio is off — scanning never interrupts your sound. A USB controller needs no pairing: plug it in.
The transport row
Switches 1 to 4 are fixed on every rig, so the muscle memory carries from song to song:
- 1 — Shift
- 2 — Tuner, silent: it mutes the output and shows the tuner
- 3 — Previous song
- 4 — Next song
You teach them once. Press Learn next to a switch and stomp it. Four stomps and the controller is set up for good.
Shift
On a four-switch board — a Morningstar, or one of the Chocolate-style boxes — holding or toggling Shift makes switches 2, 3 and 4 act as pedals 5, 6 and 7. There is nothing to learn for those: the layer comes free with switch 1. Pedal 8 is the exception and needs a learned switch of its own, from a second bank if your board has one. Stage shows you where you are: a SHIFT badge while the layer is up, and the switch tiles follow it; the foot-controller screen says SHIFT IS UP for the same thing.
Assigning pedals
Two ways in, both leading to the same map:
- Long-press anything you want under your foot — a block, a capture pedal, a part chip — and choose Bind to a footswitch.
- Or go to Settings › Foot controller, pick a pedal and choose the action: block on/off, capture pedal, next part, switch to clean, rhythm or lead, next or previous song, or tuner.
Switch maps save with the rig, per controller — the same song can sit one way on the board at home and another on the one that lives in the case. The parts of a song share a map, so the wah stays on the same switch whether you are on the clean part or the lead.
A song with several parts and no pedals assigned gets one pedal per part automatically: two parts land on 6 and 7, three on 5 to 7, four on 5 to 8. Change any of them whenever you like.
Audio
Latency is the gap between the string moving and the speaker moving. It comes from the buffer the device processes audio in: smaller buffer, less delay, more work per second. ManifesTone picks a sensible default for your device.
Lowest latency (exclusive audio), in Settings › Audio, hands the audio device to ManifesTone alone and gets you the tightest the hardware can do. It is off by default, because the shared mode it replaces lets other apps keep making sound — backing tracks, a video you are learning from.
If the input goes silent, unplug the interface and plug it back in, or press Plug In again. If it is still dead, close whatever else is holding the microphone: the camera app will take the input the moment it opens and will not hand it back.
The plugin
ManifesTone is also a VST3 for Linux, macOS and Windows. Same engine, same captures, same library and the same account, so a rig you built on your phone in the room is on the track when you sit down at the desk.
MIDI mapping and Stage are app features. In a DAW the host owns MIDI, so map, automate and switch from the DAW as you would with any other plugin.
Account, credits and plans
One account covers iPhone, iPad, Android and the plugin — buy anywhere, and the plan follows you everywhere. The plugin is not a separate purchase.
What you spend is credits, and building a rig is what spends them. Current plans, prices and credit packs are on the pricing section, and your own balance, billing and subscription live in your account.
Bring your own key
If you have an Anthropic API key of your own, sign in and put it in Settings: rig builds then run on your account rather than spending credits, with no monthly cap from us and fair-use rate limits instead.
Your plan covers three separate limits — builds a month, guitars on file, and saved rigs. A key of your own takes over the first, and from your first build on that key the third comes off too: your saved rig library is uncapped, and still syncs across your devices.
Guitars are the one limit a key does not touch. Your arsenal is sent with every build, so it costs on every build, whoever is paying — the free plan keeps one guitar on file no matter whose key it is, and raising that is what a subscription is for.
The key is held in your device's keychain and passed through to Anthropic at build time; it is never stored, cached or logged on our side. Available on iPhone, iPad, Android and in the plugin.
Troubleshooting
No sound, or the input dropped out mid-song.
Press Plug In again — that reopens the audio device and fixes most of it. If not, unplug the interface and plug it back in. Then check nothing else has taken the microphone; the camera app is the usual culprit. Last, check the interface's own gain, and that your headphones are in the interface rather than in the phone.
The app cannot find my pedal.
A Bluetooth MIDI pedal only advertises itself when it is not connected to something else, so disconnect it from your laptop or other tablet — including in that machine's own Bluetooth settings — and scan again. The foot-controller screen pauses audio while it is open, so scanning cannot interrupt your sound. If it is still missing, power-cycle the pedal.
A switch does nothing.
Three things to check, in order. Has the switch been learned? Transport switches 1 to 4 need one Learn each. Are you on the layer you think you are — is Shift held or latched? And has that pedal been given an action on this rig? Switch maps save with the rig, per controller, so a map you built for one board will not appear when you play through another.
"Next" stopped working after a reload.
Reinstalling the app clears the learned switches, since they belong to the install rather than to the rig. Go to Settings › Foot controller and Learn switches 1 to 4 again — Shift, Tuner, Previous, Next. Your rigs, parts and pedal assignments are untouched.
Two parts of the same song both say "Full song".
Neither has been marked as a part. They are already one song -- that is why they sit together -- but the chips have nothing to call them, so they fall back to the rig names. Load each one, long-press its chip in Stage and choose Mark this rig as — clean, rhythm or lead — or set the part in the save sheet. Once each has its own part, the chips read Clean, Rhythm, Lead.
Still stuck
Ask on Discord or read the support page and FAQ. Naming your device, interface and foot controller saves a round trip.