The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of many most interesting guitar amp modelers on the planet. For a sure form of gigging musician who desires to reduce bulk and doesn’t require a lot in the best way of results, it may 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 permits you to rapidly and simply make bespoke presets based mostly by yourself gear, and even obtain captures from different customers.
If you happen to’ve obtained a classic Massive Muff and a Marshall half stack that you just love however don’t need 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 deliver its distinctive seize skills and highly effective amp modeling to the plenty. At $549 it’s nonetheless not low-cost. You do not get a display screen, or among the extra superior performance from the higher-end mannequin, however my expertise tells me it might be an unbelievable stage and studio companion.
No Screens
The obvious sacrifice made within the identify 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 function set down sufficient that navigating the pedal with just some knobs, buttons, and footswitches is cheap.
{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, based mostly on basic pedals.
That’s nonetheless numerous potential mixtures to deal with, 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 is usually 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 when you’re primarily sticking to a couple core mixtures it’s not too unhealthy.
If you end up wanting to modify issues up quite a bit, there is a superb companion app. I’ve examined numerous pedals with cellular apps they usually’ve all the time been fairly unreliable. They’re usually buggy and the Bluetooth connections are finicky at finest. I had no such points with the Cortex cellular app. It linked rapidly and reliably each time, and every little thing labored precisely as anticipated.
