Guillaume Pille. I Just Decided to Design What I Needed

Since childhood, Guillaume Pille has lived among machines that make sound.

At thirteen he is writing electroacoustic pieces in a conservatory’s studio. There he also learns to play the organ. The guitar would come later.

Then metal. Pille plays in bands and records albums for his own bands, and even more for other bands just starting out.

The early 1990s. Computers are coming into the studio. He gets to play with a lot of very cool toys.

And alongside the music, science. In 2005, in Montpellier, he defends his PhD thesis in electronics, optronics and signal processing, and works in optical communications research. He is offered a lecturing post at the university.

He turns it down.

Pille would later write about it without sentiment: he decided not to make a lot of money in the telecom research business and to go into the very small market of professional musical instruments.

The reason is simple. He has a great tube amp, an ENGL. And no way at all to open it up fully at home.

Recording music at home, he realizes how much noise the people around him have to put up with. And not only them. Musicians' and technicians' ears take a beating, and that kind of damage does not heal.

There is no ready-made solution.

"There was nothing available so I just decided to design what I needed."

He does not like analog speaker sims. So he takes early impulse response software and combines it with an analog load box. That is how the idea of the digital load box is born.

First he shows it to a few people he knows, then puts it out on forums. He sees there is something in it. And he takes the risk.

The Torpedo project starts in 2006.

The first to come to Pille is Ivan Cohen, an engineering school intern. Before that he had studied at IRCAM in Paris, and later he would defend a thesis there on modeling tube guitar amps in real time.

Then Bruno Ferren, a graduate of INSA Lyon, comes for his final-year internship. He writes code for the embedded processor, and they keep him on to head hardware development.

In January 2008 Pille registers his company, OROSYS, to hire the first members of the team. Help comes from the engineering school in Alès, Polytech' Montpellier and the Languedoc-Roussillon region.

That January the home page of the company’s website offers two internships, from February to September 2008. The task: a prototype built on Analog Devices SHARC signal processors and an ARM7 microcontroller. The pay: 30 percent of the minimum wage. The place: the village of Saint-Martin-de-Londres near Montpellier.

The brand is called Two Notes. The name is deliberately not French: from the very beginning, Pille says, the whole world was their playground.

The first logo: an infinity sign with two notes written into it. And the device is called the Torpedo because a torpedo goes straight to its target. That is the line Pille gives his team: efficiency, and the straight path to the goal.

In March 2008, at Musikmesse in Frankfurt, Two Notes shows the finished Torpedo VB-101. Shipping is promised by May.

It happens by December.

From December 4 to 13 there is the Torpedo Tour of French shops: free try-outs, and on the program a concert by guitarist Kenny Serane. The official launch is on December 17, 2008.

The timing could not be worse. "In 2008, when we were starting out, the market was in ruins," Pille recalls. Expensive units are a hard sell, and the company makes cheaper models, for amateurs and semi-pros.

In January 2009 Pille appears on France 3 regional television. On the company website he leaves a short note. The media like to simplify things and call him an inventor, but Two Notes products are the work of a team without which the inventor in question could do very little.

The testers are the first to give in. Tristan Klein of Audiofanzine falls for the box at the Salon de la Musique et du Son, and the VB-101 starts recording the guitar for the site’s video tests.

In January 2010 Two Notes goes to NAMM for the first time and shows its next model there, the VM-202. The Torpedo reaches the US and Canada.

In 2011 the first plugin comes out, the Torpedo PI-101. Swedish metal producer Dan Swanö writes that it is by far the best replacement for a real cabinet.

In 2012 comes the Torpedo Live: a 100-watt analog reactive load plus DSP and convolution.

By May of that year the company is already in an industrial zone in Vendargues, in roomier premises: the incubator had grown too cramped for its logistics. It has eight employees.

And then, unexpected fame. British guitarist Robin Le Mesurier plays Johnny Hallyday’s tour through the company’s gear. The Arena in Montpellier, and eight people from Vendargues are on stage with Johnny. Invisible, but on stage.

Then the line grows: the Torpedo Reload, the C.A.B. pedal, the Wall of Sound plugin, the Torpedo Studio. Steve Stevens, Billy Idol’s guitarist, makes a video about how he works with his Torpedo Studio.

At Musikmesse 2015 Two Notes brings the Le Preamp series of tube preamps: Le Clean, Le Crunch, Le Lead and Le Bass. The most French thing the company has, and that is on purpose: Pille wanted to play with the French cliché.

There is an arcade machine at the booth. The editing modes in the devices are called Arcade and Simulation.

Why Arcade? Pille just likes video games.

In 2017 the Torpedo Captor comes out, an analog reactive load.

And in January 2020 the Captor X debuts at NAMM. It goes on sale during the first lockdown. People are locked in at home, looking for a simpler way to record. The Captor X wins Sound On Sound’s award for Best Guitar Technology Product of 2020, and Pille calls it the company’s first global success.

At the end of 2021 Two Notes takes the Le Preamp series off sale. It is redesigned from scratch: all the good stuff from the three guitar preamps goes into one box.

That is how the ReVolt Guitar comes about. Announced in May 2022, it debuts at NAMM in June. It was promised for September, but production turned out to be more complex than expected, and they decided not to rush it. The ReVolt goes on sale on December 27, 2022.

Three channels, each with its own model. American Clean is based on the Fender Bassman 100. British Crunch on the Marshall JMP Super Lead. Modern Lead on the Soldano SLO-100, the very one from Mike Soldano’s story.

"It’s based on some of the amps in my collection, actually!" says Pille.

Inside there is one real tube, a 12AX7 running at 200 volts. The signal path is fully analog: nothing digital, no Torpedo processing. For some buyers this is a matter of principle; Pille puts them at ten to fifteen percent. The ReVolt does have firmware, but it only switches the channels and listens to MIDI. It does not touch the sound.

The ReVolt’s analog cabinet simulator is based on a Marshall 4×12 Slash Signature. Back in 2011 Pille listed this very cabinet as part of his rig: he used it on stage as a monitor.

Pille himself sees the ReVolt as a modest, transitional product. But with it, he says, a guitarist does not need an amp collection.

From the very start the Torpedo was conceived as a box that replaces four things: the power amp, the speaker cabinet, the microphone and the microphone preamp.

The first of these jobs is the most delicate. Without a load a tube amp will burn out, and a load is not just a resistance.

A simple resistive load has a fixed impedance of 4, 8 or 16 ohms across all frequencies. That is how the industry tests amps silently. The sound comes out warmer, and the power amp goes into saturation a little sooner. A reactive load reproduces the complex impedance of a real speaker. The sound is brighter and more natural.

Why this matters was explained best by Sound On Sound back in 2010. The more accurately the impedance curve is replicated, the more closely the output stage’s negative feedback matches that produced with a real speaker. And that means the power tube distortion and the feel under the fingers are the ones the player is used to.

The Captor manual says it more briefly: the amp will absolutely believe it is connected to a real cabinet.

Inside the Captor X there is a real coil. Under load it quietly sings, as if a tiny speaker were hidden in the box. The manual is reassuring: this is perfectly normal. It is just the amp being heard at work for the first time, and that can be alarming.

Then the microphone. In the Torpedo Studio menu the guitarist takes the place of the sound engineer. The virtual microphone moves from the center of the cone to its edge, up to three meters from the cabinet, and even behind it. The Overload parameter adds the distortion of the speaker itself, all the way to the sound of a loudspeaker close to destruction.

The speaker’s distortion is the most expensive part of the computation. The VB-101’s latency is under five milliseconds, like standing about a meter and a half from the cabinet. It can be cut to three, but then the Overload is gone.

Then DynIR. Every cabinet is captured with eight real microphones, with ten thousand positions in front of the cabinet and ten thousand behind it for each microphone. With ordinary impulse responses, Two Notes says, this would take a library of 160,000 perfectly phase-aligned files.

For volume, Two Notes has tried three approaches. The Reload burns off the amp’s power in the load and re-amplifies the signal to the desired volume with a clean solid-state amplifier. The Captor simply cuts 20 dB. And the Captor X Pro switches the taps of an autotransformer with relays, in steps all the way down to silence.

And the funniest part. Pille started out not liking analog speaker sims. Then Two Notes squeezed its digital cabinets back into analog circuits: the simulator in Le Preamp is built on the company’s own digital model of a 4×12 cabinet captured with a dynamic microphone. From Le Preamp this simulator moved into the Captor, and Le Preamp itself grew into the ReVolt. And in 2026 Two Notes' own free Capture Studio makes neural NAM captures and names the ReVolt among the devices it can capture.

The circle has closed.

Nobody ever bought Two Notes. Pille is still the CEO, and according to the company register the president of the company is his own holding company. It employs between ten and nineteen people, and they now work in Saint-Gély-du-Fesc near Montpellier.

From the very start more than half of the units went abroad, and by 2017 it was already 80 to 85 percent.

Pille wanted to model amps from the very beginning. The Torpedo, he says, was not the main project, just a way to prime the pump. Ivan Cohen’s thesis on tube amps was about the same thing.

They only got there fifteen years later. Opus came out in 2023, and GENOME in January 2024, replacing Wall of Sound. GENOME had been promised for January 2023. It was exactly a year late.

The company’s rule: no disposable products that will be obsolete within three years.

Everything is assembled without glue, so that a unit can be repaired from A to Z. The memory is chosen with a cycle count good for decades. If a product keeps working for forty years, Pille reckons, that is not bad.

And he picks his people so that they do their job better than he would have done it himself.

There is a symmetry in this story too.

A metal guitarist could not open up his ENGL at home without disturbing the people around him. And he built a box that lets the amp run flat out while the room stays quiet.

He did not like analog speaker sims, so he went digital. And then his company squeezed its own digital cabinets back into analog circuits.

Innovation, Pille says, is usually just trying to accurately sound like an amp built forty years ago. Only first that amp has to be allowed to run at full volume. In silence.

On our site, Two Notes is represented by the free FrostPawAmp plugin and the ReVolt NAM captures.