Neural DSP Talk

Didn’t know anything about Doug. Only skimmed the 1st 15 minutes or so of that Beato video, seems he used to frequent (Spanish speaking) gear forums, made a load of friends there and got into building pedals etc, in part because gear costs so much in Chile and wages are comparatively low. Quite enjoyed seeing what the Neural employees and offices etc are like, and the kind of environment the plugins and hw gets created in. Lot of smart guys who could probably earn way more money on something non-guitar related, and ultimately it’s such a niche industry. Working your ass off to move to Finland from Chile and setting up a successful business and employing a load of people isn’t something I’d really dunk on too heavily.

The books in his office made me piss myself though 😂

EDIT: stumbled on these videos with one of their main guys (seems he was in charge of the Mayer plugin). Says they employ just under 100 people these days:

 
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All y’all can thank Ola for his help in boosting NDSP, whether or not you enjoy the brand or you spend time in these threads seething about it lol

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2dor said:
I remember when the Nameless plugin dropped - that sh!t was unreal. Still the king of high-gain plugins imho.
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It's got really good low gain tones as well, if I had to pick just one amp model in any plugin and I couldn't play any other one for the rest of my life I'd probably choose Nameless lol
 
Dez said:
All y’all can thank Ola for his help in boosting NDSP, whether or not you enjoy the brand or you spend time in these threads seething about it lol
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To be honest, that interview kind of made me both astonished and a little depressed at how much they rely on YouTube influencers to get their product sales. I never take YouTube influencers seriosuly and usually prefer to read interviews in sound on sound to get an idea if a product is for me or not. I was also sad to see Mason from Vertex, who is one of my favorite guitar YT channels, now also got into the NDSP YouTube influencer circle to promote this product.
 
nitrateaudio said:
To be honest, that interview kind of made me both astonished and a little depressed at how much they rely on YouTube influencers to get their product sales. I never take YouTube influencers seriosuly and usually prefer to read interviews in sound on sound to get an idea if a product is for me or not. I was also sad to see Mason from Vertex, who is one of my favorite guitar YT channels, now also got into the NDSP YouTube influencer circle to promote this product.
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It isn't just them. Everyone is doing it. I honestly don't know how the industry is going to get back to a place where they don't see Youtube influencers as their default marketing outlet, and I don't really see yet where the industry is going to go afterwards. It seems like a bit of a dead end to me, with no path of return.
 
nitrateaudio said:
To be honest, that interview kind of made me both astonished and a little depressed at how much they rely on YouTube influencers to get their product sales. I never take YouTube influencers seriosuly and usually prefer to read interviews in sound on sound to get an idea if a product is for me or not. I was also sad to see Mason from Vertex, who is one of my favorite guitar YT channels, now also got into the NDSP YouTube influencer circle to promote this product.
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As much as Ola is an influencer, he is also a touring guitarist with multiple projects and I get the impression he tells it like it is. I hear you though 100%
 
There was actually some pretty disturbing stuff in there
I appreciate the honesty but man that’s ugly to find out
They took 1000 preorders with a product that was not even functional and had hardware miscalculations
Then took 1000 more orders went back to Finland and only them decided to consult and industrial designer and hire a hardware guy 🙄
 
GTR37 said:
There was actually some pretty disturbing stuff in there
I appreciate the honesty but man that’s ugly to find out
They took 1000 preorders with a product that was not even functional and had hardware miscalculations
Then took 1000 more orders went back to Finland and only them decided to consult and industrial designer and hire a hardware guy 🙄
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Thats sort of how small agile startups operate. They bullshit a lot about what they can do.
 
Honestly there's not a lot of CEO's that would be all that interesting to talk to about their products. Those type of people are a lot more suited to really high stakes business conversations. Product Designers (like James Santiago) and Product Owners (like Eric Klein) are going to be much more of a treasure trove of information. Maybe an exception would be Paul Reed Smith or even someone like Randall Smith pre-Gibson acquisition.

I bailed on the video about halfway through. I think it was good to show that NDSP is actually doing stuff, and it really does seem like they are trying to be a competitive company. No amount of video however will sugar coat just how underwhelming their hardware has been over the last couple years. They really need to prove it by clearing the feature backlog.

My biggest takeaway is that they realized how far behind they were in terms of creating amp models, decided to spend a ton of time developing a process with hardware and software to try and automate the modeling work (TINA), but have very little to show for it.
 
nitrateaudio said:
To be honest, that interview kind of made me both astonished and a little depressed at how much they rely on YouTube influencers to get their product sales. I never take YouTube influencers seriosuly and usually prefer to read interviews in sound on sound to get an idea if a product is for me or not. I was also sad to see Mason from Vertex, who is one of my favorite guitar YT channels, now also got into the NDSP YouTube influencer circle to promote this product.
Click to expand...
I don't know. Youtube is available to (practically) everyone, it's video with audio, so you can show how the product looks, how it is to use and how it sounds and you get several different users/influencers showing the product. Normal people who actually bought the product are free to make videos on gear. There are also a lot of professional reviewers on youtube.

Can't imagine relying on someone writing about a product to make a choice in 2025.
 
LP59 said:
I kept wondering during that video, what do all those people do? That's a lot of people putting out very little.
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As a software developer...likely working on all the shit that needs to get done but is in no way visible to the customer. And until that shit is done, the new features can't become a thing.

They seem to have a fairly large machine learning team for a guitar gear company.
 
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