Neural DSP Nano Cortex review – the last pedalboard amp you’ll ever need?
$549/£499, neuraldsp.com
In just five years, Neural DSP has gone from a plugin maker to a brand that has revolutionised the entire guitar industry. Neural’s game-changing Quad Cortex might not have been the first floor-based profiling amplifier, but its combination of truly fantastic sounds, ease of use, and rugged reliability has seen scores of guitarists – from club giggers to stadium headliners – ditch their ‘real’ guitar amps for a QC.
READ MORE: Universal Audio UAFX Enigmatic ’82 review – can the near-mythical Dumble Overdrive Special be captured in a pedal?
Of course, the sting in the tail with the Quad Cortex was that changing the game didn’t come cheap. Yeah, it has the ability to capture your existing amps and dirt pedals with astonishing accuracy and fit them into a virtual ‘board that means you can leave all your expensive pedals and amps at home… but it also costs a buck shy of $1,700. For many guitarists then, the price of entry for Neural’s wonderful ecosystem was just too damn high.
Now however, that’s all changed – enter the Nano Cortex, perhaps the most hyped and yet polarising new guitar product of 2024.
Image: Adam Gasson
What is the Neural DSP Nano Cortex?
Neural describes the Nano Cortex as a distilled version of the Quad, and that’s pretty much the case, but not completely. Whereas the Quad is effectively an all-in-one amp and effects modeller with remarkable amp/gain capture capabilities, the Nano scales it down to the thing it does better than practically everyone else – capturing.
This means that you don’t get a lot of the stuff that you get with a full Quad Cortex – none of the ‘modelled’ amps, and the intuitive colour touchscreen interface is gone, replaced with six knobs and five soft-touch switches to enable you to tweak your current sound on the fly.
You can only run one capture at a time here, and also only get two footswitches (down from 11 on the original). Connectivity-wise the smaller unit only has mono input, stereo outs, an expression pedal out, headphone jack (with volume control) and power (either via 9-12V DC at 600mA or, helpfully, USB-C to enable you to power the Nano Cortex with a portable power bank).
If some of that feels like you’ve lost quite a lot of stuff, well you have – but it’s worth remembering that this is roughly a third of the price of the original Quad Cortex and less than half the size. Those expecting a $500 mini-QC that had identical functionality and features in a smaller footprint were probably expecting too much both from a technological and economic standpoint there.
The Nano Cortex strips down the Quad Cortex formula to bare bones, then – so what exactly is left for us to get excited about? Quite a bit actually.
Image: Adam Gasson
What does the Nano Cortex actually do?
The reason that so many megastar bands use the Quad Cortex live in 2024 isn’t because of the ease of use or ease of load-in – bands like Megadeth, Coldplay, Blink-182 and Slipknot have people to take care of that stuff for them! No, the reason they use the QC is because Neural’s capture technology is so good that it can replicate any specific amp so faithfully that even grizzled veteran musicians can’t tell the difference when it’s coming through the monitors. What’s more, it doesn’t just replicate an amp – it can replicate your actual amp. And that’s the really exciting thing that the Nano Cortex brings to the party.
Like its bigger brother, the Nano Cortex enables you to make a capture of any amp you own and take it with you in your gigbag. Don’t have a load of classic amps sitting around in your basement? Don’t worry – the Cortex Cloud app gives you access to tens of thousands of user-created captures to download for free, covering the gamut of pretty much every classic amp you could possibly imagine.
And with 256 Neural Capture slots, 256 custom IR slots, and 64 preset slots accessible via the app (25 captures, 5 IRs and four presets on the hardware itself), you’ll likely run out of amps you want to have in your rig before you do places to download them from.
There are some caveats, however. For starters, you only have two footswitches here, giving you access to those four presets (two on each switch) – do you need more than four amp sounds in one gig? I doubt it, but that’s up to you.
Image: Adam Gasson
Perhaps the biggest potential pitfall however is the signal chain – or lack thereof. Unlike the QC, the Nano Cortex has a fixed signal chain with a very limited palette of onboard effects taken from the former unit and a single capture in each preset.
This means that you can’t do what a lot of people love to do with the full-blown Quad Cortex – build sounds using multiple captures of amps and dirt pedals and the various quality onboard effects.
Instead, here you can just choose one capture (most likely an amp) and an IR in each preset, and then have the option to add a small section of pre-and post-effects to taste. Up front you have an adaptive noise gate and a transpose feature, while after the amp you can choose from delay, modulation and reverb – you can use the five effects slots all together or in tandem, however.
If the signal chain is a little underwhelming, its connectivity is pretty impressive for a unit of this size. You can use it as a full-fledged low-latency audio interface with 24-bit, 48kHz recording – there’s no need to mic up your tube amps and risk blowing out your ears. And with the dedicated headphone out, it’s a much more viable home practice option than say, one of Universal Audio’s amp pedals.
All of this comes packed in a compact metal housing, exuding the sleek, minimalist elegance reminiscent of Jony Ive’s era at Apple. It’s impressively small.
Image: Adam Gasson
Is the Nano Cortex Easy to Use?
I’m typically not a fan of pedals with smartphone app integration – if they don’t get the app side right, it can be a huge pain and take me away from what I enjoy most: playing guitar.
Thankfully Neural has clearly realised that, if its going to hide a huge amount of the functionality – including downloading captures, creating presets, performing software updates and creating captures – in the Cortex Cloud app, it better work well.
In fact, the Nano Cortex offers the easiest setup process I’ve encountered in any modeller on the market. It’s practically foolproof. Within the first 10 minutes, I had the app downloaded, the Nano Cortex paired, and I was already on my way to capturing my first profile.
Even if you don’t have any plans to capture your amps any time soon, the experience is a doddle – within a few minutes I was searching through the huge library of user captures on Cortex Cloud and using them to create presets that I quickly added to the pedal’s preset banks.
The on-pedal knobs allow you to tweak a three-band tone stack, level, gain and the like on the fly – and they’re conveniently lit up with LEDs to show you what they’re set at on the preset even if that doesn’t correspond to the current knob position. Smart.
The lack of a screen is an understandable cost and space saver here, but I do find I miss something to indicate what preset I’m using. Colour LEDs on the footswitches are fine but with so many presets, it’s easy to forget what colour means what – having to check your phone app to double-check is not ideal. But how does it actually sound?
Image: Adam Gasson
Does the Neural DSP Nano Cortex sound good?
Capturing is clearly fundamental to what the Nano Cortex is designed to do – Neural’s devoted an entire button on this compact interface to it after all – so where better to start? Perhaps the most impressive thing is how quick it all is – whereas other capture methods can take hours to do their thing (IK’s Tonex being a particularly long-winded example) the Neural capture literally takes five minutes.
I’ve heard good things about Neural’s profiling fidelity, but even these lofty expectations were immediately exceeded when I heard the capture of my Matchless Nighthawk 15. Somehow, Nano Cortex’s capture managed to replicate all the subtleties of my amp. As a tube purist, I didn’t expect to be this impressed – I can’t help smiling as I hear it faithfully reproduce all the nuances of the sound I know so well.
In truth though, I probably didn’t need to bother – a quick search on the Cortex Cloud app reveals a handful of Nighthawk captures I could have downloaded in seconds, and that is the true brilliance of the Nano Cortex. The library of user captures is so vast, and you can easily find the good ones based on user recommendations. It opens up a whole world of amps you might never have thought you’d try, right there on your pedalboard.
I said up top that the onboard effects were quite limited, and they are – but what’s here is very good. I have incredibly high standards for time-based effects, and Neural more than delivers with the Mind Hall Reverb [inspired by the trailblazing Lexicon 224 digital reverb]. It’s hauntingly beautiful without being overly washy, allowing the captured emulation to shine without coming across as overtly digital. The analogue delay meanwhile, is tasteful, and I find it particularly useful for channelling The Edge-like textures (with an appropriate amp model of course).
Image: Adam Gasson
Should I buy a Nano Cortex over a Tonex or Helix?
A lot of the vitriol dedicated towards the Nano Cortex since its launch has been focused on what the pedal is, compared to what some people expected it to be. This isn’t offering all the Quad Cortex functionality in a pedal-sized format, nor is it a full-featured multi-effects unit like the Helix – if you go in expecting one of those things you’re likely to be disappointed.
Instead, the Nano Cortex is designed for a specific but common use case – the ‘end of pedalboard’ amp. As the freedom to play loud becomes increasingly restrained for many of us, the ability to stick a box at the end of your existing board that can replicate any amp with remarkable fidelity and responsiveness – and at a level that is suitable for the environment we’re playing in – is super exciting.
There are some points of contention that I do have. The lack of an effects loop and stereo inputs means that you’ll either have to run your stereo pedals after the amp or not use them to their full capability.
What’s more, the fixed signal chain will be a real dealbreaker for some. One capture slot feels pretty mean, and I can see it putting off people who want to either use a captured dirt pedal in front of their amp (of which there are scores on Cortex Cloud) or those who want a dual-amp setup. Even one more slot would have made this feel a bit less restrictive.
But despite the growing popularity of stereo and dual-amp rigs in recent years, I think it’s still quite a niche use case, and if we’re treating this as a pedalboard amp then who among us doesn’t have a drive pedal or two on there to use already?
This might not be the QC Mini product that people have been waiting for, but you have to take a look at the price tag again before you start asking why that is – for a third of the price you’re certainly getting more than a third of the important stuff with the Nano Cortex.
It’s definitely not perfect, and there are some caveats and use cases that would likely turn some users towards the excellent Helix and Tonex options… but given Neural’s impressive track record of adding features and functionality to the Quad Cortex over its lifetime, you can bet that this already great product is going to keep getting better in the months and years to come.
Is it as game-changing as its predecessor? Well, no. But it dramatically lowers the barrier of entry to Neural’s ecosystem – with its remarkable library of captured sounds, and incredibly simple and fast capture system.
That, more than anything else, might make this the most important Neural product yet – and one of the most important guitar products of 2024. I’m not ready to give my tube amps up just yet, but the Nano Cortex points the way to a future without them that might not be as scary as we think.
Neural DSP Nano Cortex alternatives
The elephant in the room is the IK Multimedia Tonex Pedal ($399/£299) – it’s not as elegant as the Neural technology, requiring the use of audio interfaces and desktop software to capture tones, and they take a long time to capture. However, the sounds are unimpeachable, and the pedal itself comes with a broader (but still limited) range of onboard effects. The OG of the profiling game is Kemper, and while it lacks the finesse of Neural’s units, the Profiler Stage ($1,625/£1,107) puts all the capture and effects stuff into one unit but it’s more Quad Cortex-priced. Finally, there’s the Line 6 HX Stomp ($649/£549) – the compact amp and multi-effects that many Neural fans were hoping the Nano would be a direct competitor to. There’s no profiling, but this is still a benchmark for an all-in-one pedalboard modeller.
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