The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of many best guitar amp modelers on the earth. For a sure type of gigging musician who desires to attenuate bulk and doesn’t require a lot in the best way of results, it will probably 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 function means that you can rapidly and simply make bespoke presets based mostly by yourself gear, and even obtain captures from different customers.
For those who’ve received a classic Large Muff and a Marshall half stack that you simply love, however don’t need to drag round for easy membership excursions, you may create a mannequin of your particular Marshall and Large Muff it 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 skills and highly effective amp modeling to the plenty. At $549 it’s nonetheless not low-cost. You aren’t getting a display, or among 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 identify of dimension 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 only a few knobs, buttons and footswitches is affordable.
{Photograph}: Terrence O’Brien
The place the Quad Cortex supplies you with over 90 amp fashions, over a thousand impulse responses and over 100 completely different results, the Nano sticks with the best hits from that huge library. It ships with 25 amp fashions, 300 impulse responses (IRs) and single choices for refrain, delay, and reverb, based mostly on traditional pedals.
That’s nonetheless various potential combos to cope with, and doesn’t account for the power 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 in case you’re primarily sticking to some core combos it’s not too dangerous.
If you end up wanting to modify issues up loads, there is a wonderful companion app. I’ve examined a lot of pedals with cell 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 cell app. It linked rapidly and reliably each time, and every thing labored precisely as anticipated.
