Cypress TT-15

About the Cypress TT-15

Inspired by the Orange Tiny Terror: the low-wattage British lunchbox head that proved you don't need a full stack and a wall of knobs to sound huge — just a great tube circuit and the good sense to keep it simple.

The Cypress TT-15 is a free guitar amp head plugin, and "free" is not a euphemism for "watered down" here. We meticulously modelled a versatile, uniquely voiced low-wattage amplifier — pre-amp and power-amp tube stages, the tone filter and the output transformer — as a living circuit, not a snapshot of one setting. Six controls, no menu-diving, and a switchable speaker cabinet simulation baked in. Plug in, turn it up, and you're recording. That's the whole idea.

The Tiny Terror philosophy, modelled circuit by circuit

The amp that inspired the Cypress TT-15 built its reputation on a switch most of its rivals didn't have: a power selector that drops from 15 watts down to 7. Fewer watts means the power section clips sooner and harder, so you get that saturated, singing breakup at bedroom-friendly levels instead of only at neighbour-annoying volume. We captured that behaviour with our real-time, SPICE-style circuit simulation, which is why the amp reacts to your picking dynamics and your guitar's volume knob the way a real tube head does — clean up when you back off, growl when you dig in.

From glassy cleans to biting lead, on six knobs

Start with the Gain low and you get open, glassy clean tones with plenty of headroom. Push it and the pre-amp thickens into crunch; run it flat out and the head tips into heavy, biting distortion that still keeps its note definition. The Tone control is a single roll-off filter — counter-clockwise for a darker, warmer voice, clockwise to open things up and brighten. The Volume knob drives the power-amp stage into a gentle overdrive of its own, so the amp's final character comes from how you balance Gain against Volume, exactly like on the hardware. A clip lamp on the panel lights up as the output level climbs, so you always know when the signal is running hot on the way out.

Reamping, DI tracks and the always-there cab sim

Drop the Cypress TT-15 on a DI guitar track and switch the Cabinet section in for an instant, mix-ready tone — no impulse-response hunting required. Prefer your own cab sim or an external power-amp and speaker rig? Bypass the cabinet and the head feeds straight out. Because it costs nothing, it's an easy first amp for anyone building a rig, a reliable scratch tone while tracking, and a legitimate keeper for crunch and lead parts. It sits nicely alongside our other free tools like the drum-shaping Canary when you're putting a no-cost starter chain together.

Cypress TT-15 Features

Low / High output voicing switch

The Output switch flips the amp between two power-stage configurations, Low and High. Each runs the modelled power section at a different rail voltage, so switching from High to Low reworks the amp's bias and pushes it into earlier, thicker breakup — the low-wattage lunchbox trick that lets you find saturated tone without chasing sheer volume.

Gain from glassy clean to heavy distortion

Lower Gain settings stay clean with headroom to spare; roll it up for crunch, and turn it fully clockwise for heavy, biting lead distortion that keeps its note definition instead of turning to mush.

Single-knob Tone roll-off

The Tone filter works as a treble roll-off: counter-clockwise for a darker, warmer voice, clockwise to open the top end and brighten. One control, the whole clean-to-crunch tonal range covered.

Volume that drives the power amp

Volume sets the output level, and at higher settings it pushes the modelled power-amp into a gentle overdrive. Balancing Gain against Volume is how you sculpt the head's final character, just like the original.

Switchable speaker cabinet simulation

A built-in speaker cabinet simulation gives you a mix-ready tone out of the box. Flip the Cabinet switch to bypass it when feeding your own IR loader, cab sim or external power-amp and speaker stage.

Authentic circuit emulation

Our real-time, SPICE-type component-based circuit simulation captures the sound and feel of the analog counterpart in every nuance — the pre- and power-amp tube stages, the tone filter and the output transformer are all faithfully modelled and matched.

SSE2-optimised code

DSP operations are pipelined on the SSE2 instruction set for high-performance operation, even under complex processing.

Auto-adjusted oversampling

A low-latency, linear-phase Dolph-Chebyshev polyphase design attenuates aliasing and auto-adjusts to your session's sample rate to save CPU while staying transparent.

HighDPI / Retina support

Crisp, high-pixel-density rendering on macOS and Windows for a sharp interface on modern displays.

Cypress TT-15 Examples & Videos