The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of many most interesting guitar amp modelers on the earth. For a sure sort of gigging musician who desires to reduce bulk and doesn’t require a lot in the best way of results, it could fairly convincingly re-create any variety of amps, and has loads of choices for bread and butter results like delay, reverb, and refrain. Plus, its Neural Seize function lets you rapidly and simply make bespoke presets primarily based by yourself gear, and even obtain captures from different customers.
For those who’ve obtained a classic Huge Muff and a Marshall half stack that you just love however don’t wish to drag round for easy membership excursions, you’ll be able to create a mannequin of your particular Marshall and Huge Muff with only a few button presses on the Quad Cortex. There’s only one drawback: It’s $1,699.
The Nano Cortex is Neural DSP’s effort to carry its distinctive seize talents and highly effective amp modeling to the lots. At $549 it’s nonetheless not low-cost. You aren’t getting a display, or a number of the extra superior performance from the higher-end mannequin, however my expertise tells me it might be an unimaginable stage and studio companion.
No Screens
The obvious sacrifice made within the title of dimension and cost-cutting is that lack of a touchscreen. The Quad Cortex is an absurdly complicated machine that will be impenetrable with out the touchscreen. The Nano Cortex strips down the function set down sufficient that navigating the pedal with only a few knobs, buttons, and footswitches is affordable.
{Photograph}: Terrence O’Brien
The place the Quad Cortex gives you with greater than 90 amp fashions, 1,000 impulse responses, and 100 totally different results, the Nano sticks with the best hits from that large library. It ships with 25 amp fashions, 300 impulse responses (IRs), and single choices for refrain, delay, and reverb, primarily based on traditional pedals.
That’s nonetheless various potential mixtures to cope with, and doesn’t account for the flexibility to load customized captures and impulse responses that you just’ve both created your self or downloaded from different Cortex customers. Navigating them could be a little complicated because the solely indicators on the pedal are 5 LEDs over every footswitch, and all of your captures and IRs are divided into color-coded banks. However if you happen to’re primarily sticking to some core mixtures it’s not too dangerous.
If you end up wanting to modify issues up loads, there is a superb companion app. I’ve examined quite a few pedals with cellular apps and so they’ve all the time been fairly unreliable. They’re typically buggy and the Bluetooth connections are finicky at greatest. I had no such points with the Cortex cellular app. It related rapidly and reliably each time, and all the pieces labored precisely as anticipated.
