Like many stories, it's hard to tell where the story of Overloud TH1 guitar modeling software begins. It was an idea that was on deck when Overloud started in 2006, but the developers who came together to build Overloud's foundation had all been in the DSP game for some tome prior.

The "TH" in the product name refers to head developer and CTO Thomas Serafini. Before the conception of Overloud, Serafini spent time developing a lot of guitar VST plugins that had no GUIs. You can't spell guitar plugin without GUI, am I right? Of course I am, so at Overloud Thomas and two others met at a fast food restaurant in central Italy (I'm guessing it was better than Fazoli's) to plan things out on napkins.

After the meeting, and over the next couple of years, Overloud went to work on making the main features of TH1 its sound quality, ease of use and control capabilities.

The sound on TH1 is powered by a fourth generation tube and analog emulation engine, and their SLR technology morphs between amps to widen sonic options and fill in sound possibilities between one amp and another. Options are multiplied again by 3D microphone positioning in front of virtual cabs with ReSPiRe technology. Overloud's highly-touted BREVERB gets tapped into for reverb effects, and TH1 is topped off with global controls that influence sound and simple, true stereo in and out options.

Overloud also added a bunch of features to make TH1 easy to use. The signal path is, from their perspective, easily understandable and modifiable. There is an in-line tuner to keep you from having to plug in and out every time a tuner loosens. TH1 can also be switched to a compact view in live mode, and its advanced memory management is detailed with 12 factory banks with 93 sounds and 462 variations. Control is also a major focus with a full MIDI Program and Bank Change control section, smart controls to tweak your sounds in new and interesting ways and the ability to control the latter with the former.

Other features include:

• Very low CPU usage
• Plugin or Standalone mode
• The amplifier introduces four samples latency
• Zero latency for all other modules
• Eight Amplifiers with 15 total Channels and 21 operating Modes
• 21 Cabinets
• 18 Microphones: choice of Dynamic, Ribbon and Condenser
• Two microphones for each Cabinet
• Studio Ambience reverb optionally added proportionally to the distance of the microphone from the speakers
• 50 stomp boxes, pedals and rack effects
• Parameter-based BPM sync switch
• Local and Global Tap buttons
• Host or Internal Tempo Sync