Neural DSP

Douglas Castro and Francisco Cresp founded Neural DSP Technologies in Helsinki in 2017, growing it out of Castro's earlier bass-gear venture Darkglass Electronics. The Archetype series of artist-signature amp plugins — built with players including John Petrucci, Tim Henson and John Mayer — established the brand's software side, and the Quad Cortex hardware unit followed in 2020, using quad-core processors and Neural Capture technology that Guitar World called a new "gold standard" in amp modelling. A smaller Quad Cortex Mini arrived in 2026. We follow the plugin updates and hardware reviews closely, and it's a fixture in our amp modeler roundups. Here's what we've covered.