When Overloud was founded in 2006, the mad scientists constituting its tech-core had already about ten years of experience in the field of analog and tube emulation. In particular, our head DSP developer and CTO Thomas Serafini worked on lots of revered plug-in products from the late 90s and early 2000s.

After that experience he chose to go back to the University (he’s still a young man) in order to take further his research on analog, digital and tube modeling.

In that era, Thomas published the Simulanalog.org website featuring highly regarded GUI-less guitar-oriented VST plug-ins for PC. Once he realized that his ideas had potential for a totally new generation of amp-modeling products he joined the other partners to start Overloud with the main goal of being able to further develop and refine his research full-time and in a product-oriented fashion.

More than two years later, TH1 is now born and its name carries an homage to Thomas (TH) and his relentless research for perfection in modeling and nonetheless excellent algorithm design optimizations taking TH1 to a Quality vs. CPU cycles level unheard of before.

In 2006 the first GUI concepts we developed for the forth-to-come-TH1 were rather standard, maybe a bit too similar to what the competition has still on offer now.

We quickly understood that a nice looking GUI was not enough to fulfill our goals and had to be comparable in concept to quality level of our models. The User Interface was the key!

So, while the rest of the Overloud team was busy developing BREVERB, three of us met at a fast-food in the middle of nowhere in central Italy to discuss about the ‘guitar-thing’: the mad scientist no. 1, the bug-eating and feature-fond developer and the foolish guitarist-engineer-producer.

After a long meeting (and lots of sodas and water), some ideas were put on paper (tissues!).

TH1 Early Concept - AD 2006