About Thrilltone

History

« In 2012, I finally decided to dive into something concrete. Let’s say that during the twelve years I was evolving in the electronics industry, I often had ideas and projects of electronic instruments designs, but these unfortunately stayed at concept phase, mainly due to lack of time and resources. For some time, I was just bored to turn knobs instead of playing guitar, and had decided to remove all effects and machines from my guitar rig, to focus on the main thing only : one guitar and one amp, that’s it. Then I was stunned to hear how the effects I was using since years had just ruined my playing dynamics and expressiveness, and I progressively found the pleasure of playing and creating again.

No need to say that this effects sobriety was not too durable, considering that I pretty quickly wanted to enlarge my sound scope again. But this time, the obsession of expressiveness and dynamics preservation led me to get my hands dirty and to design my own effects, starting with an overdrive. At the time, I didn’t know much about overdrive’s guts, but instead of basing my concept on existing designs, I wanted to start from scratch in order to explore my own ways, only guided by the sound characteristics I wanted to get… A few weeks later, the outlines of the Cellular Clipping™ technology were drawn, and I was trying the first prototype. I was immediately impressed about the rendering : natural, expressive and accurate. I was on the right way, even if there were still some improvements to achieve. And then I’ve been sucked into the project… A second prototype, then a third one, adding at each step electronics complexity for improved subtlety, higher versatility and better ease of use. In 30 months, more than 10 prototypes from what would become the Drive Recovery have been built, tested and improved. At each step, I just wanted to dig further, to improve tone print and stomp appearance. After all this time spent to create an ultimate overdrive experience, and considering feedbacks from guitarists being more and more enthusiastic, it actually seemed natural to me to share it beyond my private sphere. This is the point where Thrilltone was born.

Philosophy

First, Thrilltone is the willingness to share findings and disrupting approaches on analog guitar effects, more expressive and natural. It’s based on the conviction that technological improvement from the last 50 years should not be an obstacle, but a driving force instead, to imagine a new generation of high end analog effects.
Thrilltone is also the willingness to provide effects that stimulate creativity of musicians, exploring new paths, integrating new relevant control means for a better ease of use, and thus bringing to musicians a unique user experience.

Pierre-Benoît Prud’homme – Founder