The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of many most interesting guitar amp modelers on the earth. 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 could actually fairly convincingly recreate any variety of amps, and has loads of choices for bread and butter results like delay, reverb and refrain. Plus, its Neural Seize characteristic means that you can shortly and simply make bespoke presets based mostly by yourself gear, and even obtain captures from different customers.
In case you’ve acquired a classic Massive Muff and a Marshall half stack that you simply love, however don’t wish to drag round for easy membership excursions, you may create a mannequin of your particular Marshall and Massive Muff it with only a few 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 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 may very well 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 complicated machine that might be impenetrable with out the touchscreen. The Nano Cortex strips down the characteristic 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 over 90 amp fashions, over a thousand impulse responses and over 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 combos to deal with, and doesn’t account for the flexibility to load customized captures and impulse responses that you simply’ve both created your self or downloaded from different Cortex customers. Navigating them generally is 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 combos it’s not too unhealthy.
If you end up wanting to change issues up loads, there is a wonderful companion app. I’ve examined numerous 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 finest. I had no such points with the Cortex cellular app. It linked shortly and reliably each time, and every part labored precisely as anticipated.
