The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of many best 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 could actually 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 means that you can shortly and simply make bespoke presets based mostly by yourself gear, and even obtain captures from different customers.
Should you’ve obtained a classic Large Muff and a Marshall half stack that you simply 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 Large Muff with just some button presses on the Quad Cortex. There’s only one drawback: It’s $1,699.
The Nano Cortex is Neural DSP’s effort to convey its distinctive seize talents and highly effective amp modeling to the plenty. At $549 it’s nonetheless not low cost. You do not get a display, or a number 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 measurement and cost-cutting is that lack of a touchscreen. The Quad Cortex is an absurdly advanced machine that will 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 affordable.
{Photograph}: Terrence O’Brien
The place the Quad Cortex offers 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 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 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 for those who’re primarily sticking to a couple core combos it’s not too dangerous.
If you end up wanting to modify issues up quite a bit, there is a superb companion app. I’ve examined quite a few pedals with cell apps they usually’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 cell app. It linked shortly and reliably each time, and every thing labored precisely as anticipated.
