Despite facing borderline insurmountable competition when the firm first got up and running, Neural DSP has not only managed to enter the digital guitar gear market, but it’s been able to rise straight to the very top. And it has done so in just six years. First, founders Doug Castro (CEO) and Francisco Cresp (CPO) set about innovating a suite of state-of-the-art plugins – and, later, signature packages – which have since been championed by numerous high-profile artists, Tim Henson, Mateus Asato and Cory Wong among them.
Then, they sought to pioneer an amp modeler multi-effects pedal in record time, which would eventually flip the market on its head upon release. Indeed, after debuting at NAMM 2020, the Quad Cortex quickly became the gold standard of its kind. That’s no mean feat, especially when one considers the competition Castro and Cresp were up against.
Line 6, Fractal, Kemper and Boss all had years-long headstarts over Neural DSP, but by combining world class tones with unprecedented consumer tech-level functionality, the Quad Cortex cemented its status as the do-it-all digital floorboard unit for countless players. Such competition, though, necessitated an outside-of-the-box approach – one that would not only help Neural DSP assemble an archive of digital amps and catch up with the competition, but also allow it to exceed its rivals in terms of tonal performance. To do so, Neural DSP quietly began working on a robot, which, after years of living outside the .