The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of many most interesting guitar amp modelers on the planet. For a sure sort of gigging musician who desires to reduce bulk and doesn’t require a lot in the way in which of results, it will probably 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 characteristic lets you rapidly and simply make bespoke presets primarily based by yourself gear, and even obtain captures from different customers.
If you happen to’ve acquired a classic Massive Muff and a Marshall half stack that you just love however don’t wish to drag round for easy membership excursions, you may create a mannequin of your particular Marshall and Massive Muff with just some button presses on the Quad Cortex. There’s only one downside: It’s $1,699.
The Nano Cortex is Neural DSP’s effort to convey its distinctive seize skills and highly effective amp modeling to the plenty. At $549 it’s nonetheless not low-cost. You aren’t getting a display, or a few of the extra superior performance from the higher-end mannequin, however my expertise tells me it could possibly be an unbelievable 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 advanced machine that may be impenetrable with out the touchscreen. The Nano Cortex strips down the characteristic set down sufficient that navigating the pedal with just some knobs, buttons, and footswitches is affordable.
{Photograph}: Terrence O’Brien
The place the Quad Cortex offers you with greater than 90 amp fashions, 1,000 impulse responses, and 100 completely 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 basic pedals.
That’s nonetheless numerous potential mixtures to take care of, and doesn’t account for the power 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 for the reason that 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 in the event you’re primarily sticking to a couple core mixtures it’s not too dangerous.
If you end up wanting to change issues up rather a lot, there is a superb companion app. I’ve examined various pedals with cell apps and so they’ve at all times been fairly unreliable. They’re typically buggy and the Bluetooth connections are finicky at finest. I had no such points with the Cortex cell app. It related rapidly and reliably each time, and all the things labored precisely as anticipated.
