About Softube: a Rock & Roll Science story

It all started with tubes. More precisely tubes from a Marshall JCM800 guitar amplifier. On a day like any other back in 2003, Oscar Öberg, then an engineering grad student in his twenties, was sticking probes to that amp in a lab at Linköping University in Sweden. A musician himself, Oscar was convinced that there was a better way to digitally recreate analog gear than the lifeless emulations that were available on the market at the time.

That scene caught the eye of Niklas Odelholm, another musician and digital signal processing student. Soon word spread, the idea got amplified, and the fellow musicians and students Arvid Rosén and Torsten Gatu joined the band.

Two decades later, those Fab Four are still running the company, driven by the same love for the scientific work combined with a passion for music and music production. While this mix has remained a constant, a lot has changed since Softube’s academic beginnings. During these 20-plus years, Softube has partnered up with the very best in its field, like Marshall itself, Tube-Tech, Solid State Logic, Weiss Engineering, Drawmer, Summit Audio, Empirical Labs, and more. The result is meticulous recreations of industry-standard audio equipment as plug-ins loved and used by GRAMMY-winning pros on countless multi-platinum records.

The Softube of today is still proudly small, still based in Linköping, and backed by a real wall of sound: a complete ecosystem with 100+ products, from software versions of classics to hardware controllers that seamlessly integrate a producer’s dream sound with their dream workflow. As always, all powered by Rock & Roll and Science playing to the same beat, in the same key.