3 Cheers for Neuro 3: A Brief History of the Neuro Effects Editor.

Hey folks! Summertime marks a bit of a slowdown in the music gear industry. With folks going off to spend time at the beach and in the woods, I thought I’d take a moment to take stock of one of our most important products. The Neuro Editor.

If you’re familiar with Source Audio, you’re probably familiar with the Neuro Editor. Part sound design studio, part preset manager, part community resource, and 100% coded with Source Audio’s DNA, Neuro is the interface to our pedals’ brains. Neuro allows access to deep parameters and settings that would otherwise be unavailable on a simple guitar pedal. This free software helps to tell the story of Source Audio as a company.

The Beginning: Analog Devices

Back in the days before Source Audio existed, our eventual co-founders, Roger Smith and Jesse Remignanti were creating high-tech digital signal processing chips at Analog Devices, one of the top semiconductor companies on the planet. Analog Devices created the Sigma and SHARC DSP – powerful digital signal processors that served at the heart of top-end digital effects made by companies like Line 6, Strymon, Meris, and Fractal Audio.

Analog Devices realized they needed to provide a way for anybody without extreme technical knowledge of DSP coding to be able to access and manipulate all of the functions of their powerful signal processors. So, during his time at Analog Devices Jesse created a graphical user interface called SigmaStudio to achieve this exact goal. Sound familiar?

The original SigmaStudio interface for SigmaDSP and SHARC audio processors

From SigmaStudio to Neuro

Part of Source Audio’s ethos over the years has been to give you as much control over your sound as possible. We’ve always provided huge amounts of functionality in our products. Even back in the days of the Hot Hand Wireless Expression Controller, the point was to put control in your hands. Literally! So when we created our One Series line of pedals, we developed access to deep parameters that wouldn’t otherwise be available on a simple 4-knob guitar pedal. The goal was simple: allow users to balance the form and the function of our products to their liking.

For some of our users, these deep parameters are unnecessary for their use of our effects. Perfectly happy with the control and sounds that our hardware provides, they opt to use our pedals like traditional pedals without Neuro. For others, these controls are essential to dialing-in their tones and integrating our gear into their setups. For them, Neuro is like a painter’s palate with all of the different colors at their disposal. For others still, Neuro serves as a repository of factory and user-created effects that they can browse and use at will.

Neuro v.2

Neuro 2's Desktop Editor provided rich tone-sculpting capabilities, but needed a major face-lift

We’ve come a long way since the original Neuro app. Neuro's first iteration was only available for iPhone, and relied on the existence of an 1/8in headphone jack. If only we could have seen the future... It hasn’t always looked pretty. At times, we’ve felt like Sisyphus, constantly pushing out our latest firmware or editor fixes in an uphill battle against an evolving technological landscape. Neuro 2 came along as a necessity to allow access to the pedals via a USB connection, as well as to provide a desktop editing experience. Despite its bare-bones user interface, the software worked very smoothly and served many users well over the years.

Neuro 3.0, SoundCheck, and Beyond

With the release of Neuro 3, we are stepping into the present with an eye on the future. Thanks to help from thousands of Neuro users, we completed a successful beta-testing period full of opportunities to learn from our customers and refine our product. Because of the combined efforts of our engineers and user feedback, we now have overhauled editors, a whole new user interface, new cloud and community features, and real-time preset previewing capabilities all available at your fingertips.

That last feature is called SoundCheck and we’re super excited about it. SoundCheck allows you to listen to bit-perfect emulations of any effect in the Neuro library, while changing parameters and hearing those changes in real time. All you have to do is download the app on your computer or mobile device. No pedal required.

Download Neuro 3.0 - it's free

More new features are still being developed, and the implications of being able to produce exact emulations of our effects in the Neuro app, away from the DSP chips that we’ve called home all these years, is enormous.  Can you imagine being able to load your favorite pedal preset into your favorite DAW, and vice-versa? Because that’s what we’re imagining. A perfect tool for you to take from the studio to the stage. There’s never been a better time to be immersed in the Source Audio ecosystem.

With the release of Encounter in September, we will have our most gorgeous editor to date. We’ve streamlined the user experience to create an intuitive, powerful, effective, and fun experience. Just as we’ve been striving towards this whole time, Neuro provides access to deep sound editing tools and opens the possibilities of our products. Only now, it’s really, really pretty. You can expect more of this from Neuro going forward.

Isn’t it pretty?

Neuro has grown into a state-of-the-art editor, preset manager, community preset library, and pedal previewing platform. The number one reason we keep investing in this free software is because our users continue to invest in us. Watching the growth of the Neuro user-base and effects library over time tells us that there is an incredible amount of value in enabling Source Audio users to fully customize their experience. It’s what a lot of you want, but of course, we’ve thought that from the beginning 😉 

Neuro's growth over the years

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re enjoying your summer. If you haven’t checked out Neuro 3 yet, give it a spin! Check out a few presets on SoundCheck and let us know what you think.

About the Author

Matt Bailin: Matt is a Product Manager at Source Audio. When he's not fixing broken pedals or testing the latest firmware update, you can probably find him rocking out with one of his many musical projects. His latest release is 2025's "WTF!?" by Rick Berlin and the Nickel and Dime Band, on which he played lead guitar, saxophone, and arranged all the horn parts. Listen: https://rickberlin.bandcamp.com/album/wtf