The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of many best guitar amp modelers on the planet. For a sure type of gigging musician who needs to reduce bulk and doesn’t require a lot in the way in which of results, it may possibly 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 permits you to rapidly and simply make bespoke presets primarily based by yourself gear, and even obtain captures from different customers.
In the event you’ve bought a classic Huge Muff and a Marshall half stack that you simply love, however don’t need to drag round for easy membership excursions, you possibly can create a mannequin of your particular Marshall and Huge Muff it 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 carry its distinctive seize talents 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 might 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 complicated gadget 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 cheap.
{Photograph}: Terrence O’Brien
The place the Quad Cortex offers 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 huge library. It ships with 25 amp fashions, 300 impulse responses (IRs) and single choices for refrain, delay, and reverb, primarily based on traditional pedals.
That’s nonetheless numerous potential mixtures 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 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 modify issues up so much, 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 usually 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 pieces labored precisely as anticipated.
