Neural DSP’s Doug Castro and Francisco Cresp on the Nano Cortex, and ‘those’ marketing videos
Neural DSP had a tough job with its second-ever hardware product – the ubiquitous, well-loved and incredibly powerful Quad Cortex set the bar very high. And for a follow-up, rather than a bigger and beefier unit, we got the Nano Cortex. It’s a scaled-down and streamlined unit, and while it offers a fixed signal chain and a single capture block, it does let you access Neural’s rather uncanny capture tech at a much more approachable price – as well as a whole universe of other users’ captures.
And, yes, although it was launched alongside a rather baffling and incredibly poorly-received video campaign (more on that later), it’s safe to say the brand has avoided the trap of the difficult second album.
READ MORE: Neural DSP Nano Cortex review – the last pedalboard amp you’ll ever need?
But first a quick refresher on how we got here. Neural DSP was founded by Doug Castro and Francisco Cresp, who both found themselves on similar paths within music. “There’s a lot of parallels,” Doug says. “We were both exchange students in Finland, and both from Chile, we both love music and technology. I moved here [Finland] slightly after we met in Chile to start Darkglass Electronics – he moved a few years later and we reconnected. We were working together at Darkglass for a few years, and we both had really cool ideas: he wanted to do plugins, and I wanted to make what then became the Quad Cortex. After a few years of talking about it, we decided to start a company and do these things.”
As Neural grew, the pair settled into different roles, with Doug being the CEO and Francisco the CPO, or chief product officer. The company gained its footing in the industry with its plugin offerings, a deliberate decision that allowed the Neural DSP name to be established before the company embarked on the costly and ambitious Quad Cortex.
Douglas Castro of Neural DSP. Credit: Tapio Auvinen
“We were working on the Quad Cortex pretty pretty much from the get go, but the amount of work and money you need to do something like that is exponentially higher than a plugin,” Doug explains – the library of the Quad Cortex means many, many amps and effects, whereas the average Neural plugin has one or two amps and just a handful of effects.
Starting with plugins allowed the brand to establish a reputation and a revenue stream. And Doug notes his surprise at the plan actually panning out: “in hindsight, it was kind of a crazy, far-fetched plan. When you start, you don’t know what you don’t know, and all of these things end up being a lot harder and more expensive than you would ever think.”
Three years on
Image: Neural DSP
But it worked better than perhaps anyone could have imagined – three years on from release, the Quad Cortex has established the kind of reputation and ubiquity most guitar products can only dream of. It’s one of the best-selling floor modellers out there, and you can spot it on professional stages, local venues and everywhere in between – as well as in home and pro studios. For Francisco, the continued attention paid to keeping the Quad Cortex supported and updated with new features has been the key to that success.
“We have a couple of teams working full time on developing the platform further, delivering the things that we want to achieve with it,” he says. “We always knew that the platform was very capable and could be improved over time. So when a customer goes to buy something, they know the Quad Cortex has been maintained and supported for several years – or maybe a feature they’ve been waiting for has been added.”
He adds that the Quad Cortex has seen a lot of major improvements since launch, including better file management, better scene-switching, and expansions of the core amp and effects libraries. On top of this, the long-awaited but tricky-to-implement compatibility with its desktop plugins is finally here – initially two plugins are supported, but more are soon to be added.
For Doug the Quad Cortex’s success also lies in how it made people rethink what they could get out of a single unit. “Before we released it, there were a few dichotomies that didn’t make sense to us,” he says. “You had to choose between ease of use and power – so you had products that were really intuitive, very fun to use, but they couldn’t do that much. Or, maybe they sounded really good but they were a pain to use. And then there was another dichotomy: modelling and capturing. You had two approaches – units with just models and units with just profiling. Why not have a unit that does both really well?”
And maybe the killer feature of the Quad Cortex – its relatively compact size. While not exactly as, well, nano, as the new Nano Cortex or an HX Stomp, it was still backpackable in a world of Kemper heads and rack-mount Fractals. “You had units that were really powerful but quite big, and then units that were very compact, but couldn’t do much. We thought – why not have it be the most powerful it can be, but still super portable? Breaking those mental blocks, like, ‘I can have it all in one unit?’ – that made it super appealing for people.”
And it’s true – calling a product a gamechanger may seem a little trite, but the Quad Cortex did change how a lot of people thought of going digital, as evidenced by just how ever-present they are. But after scrambling for a while, the rest of the modelling world has started to catch up – other units like the IK Multimedia ToneX now also offer compact capture tech, and the growth of the extra-compact amp-pedals from with pro-level sounds has been exponential.
“The category that, when we were working on the Quad Cortex, didn’t exist, now is a huge thing,” Doug adds. “A lot of people want the convenience of a digital solution, but don’t have the money or the space to get into a more complex platform that requires learning and commitment.”
And so as more units with extreme ease-of-use but pro-grade sounds hit the market, Neural was spurred into action. “We saw that category growing, and we knew that the Nano Cortex could be very competitive, so thought let’s make this happen now instead of in two years from now.”
The Nano Cortex itself
Neural DSP Nano Cortex. Image: Adam Gasson
Doug is keen to stress that the idea for a smaller, more approachable hardware product has been on the cards since even before the Quad Cortex was released. “We knew that we would have this platform with all these capabilities, and that we could take some features and make products for different people.”
As work began on what became the Nano Cortex, it “took on a life of its own,” as Doug puts it. “Originally the Nano Cortex was just going to be an amp in a box – maybe reverb, cab and capture, and that was going to be it. And then we realised it had to have all of these capabilities – it can do its own capture, which needs quite a bit of CPU – it has half the CPU of a Quad Cortex. So then halfway through developing the product we realised it would be able to do a lot more eventually.”
“We have the benefit that Neural Capture has a standardised set of controls,” Francisco adds. “You have gain, bass, mid, treble and output. That allows us to create a layout that’s common for any sound that you might load into the platform. So you can use it as an amp-in-a-box, or a pedal platform with your favorite overdrives, like a tube amp. And Neural Capture can do whole stacks of things – an overdrive, an amplifier, a speaker with a mic, and everything in one.”
Francisco stresses that for Neural, hardware and software have to really work together as one to deliver the best UX possible. “We don’t think about some hardware product and then develop software towards that – we think of how these things can deliver the best experience overall, together.”
The hype machine around the Nano Cortex was started with this tease at NAMM. Credit: Josh Gardner/Guitar.com
Case in point – the lack of a screen. “That allows people who want to use it in a simple manner,” Francisco explains. “Just connect the guitar and find your sound with the rotary encoders. And that’s it. You can complicate it by connecting your phone, making your own captures, adding effects, saving presets and so on,” Francisco says. “But what I like about it is it’s very portable – you can connect it with a power bank and USB-C, connect a guitar and headphones and in two minutes you have a sound you like with the stock library. So you can get playing guitar a lot quicker than with the Quad Cortex, where finding a preset is a little more involved. It’s a much ‘faster’ product.”
As for the engineering challenges of shrinking the powerful capture process down, there were a few inevitable things – but Francisco notes that they had prepared the ground to port the capture process outside of the Quad Cortex. “The processors are the same, so a lot of the DSP code was very easy to implement, including capturing. We had always thought about our products as an ecosystem – and always had it in mind to integrate the Quad Cortex and the plugins, and the Nano Cortex and the Quad Cortex.”
And rather than just being about raw hardware compatibility, this approach plays into how Neural wants to see its products used. “We try to connect all of these products so people can produce music in their studios, play the same sounds live and take it with them to the rehearsal room, and not have to compromise on quality because of the size or price-point of the unit. If you need more features with the flagship that’s fine, but if you have $150 to buy a plugin or $580 to buy the Nano Cortex, you’re not going to suffer in terms of quality.”
The Nano Cortex. Image: Adam Gasson
Instant feedback
With this in mind, it’s worth noting that upon launch, a portion of the Neural fanbase expressed disappointment that the Nano Cortex wasn’t simply an HX Stomp-sized Quad Cortex that cost less and didn’t sacrifice any features. In the face of this, Doug says you have to balance standing by your products, but keeping an open mind to what users have to say. “I think that’s a good thing inherently, that people expect a lot from us,” Doug says, “because that really keeps us driven – pushing hard to make better products all the time. And of course, you need to have thick skin if you want to run a company, especially in the music industry, where people are very passionate about what they do.”
“Nobody needs to buy a guitar. Nobody needs a Quad Cortex or a Nano Cortex. We all are into this because we want things. And when you talk about wants versus needs, there’s a more emotional process going on there for users before making a decision. And we love that passion – we love that people really demand a lot and expect a lot. It keeps us really grounded and also working really hard to improve.”
“There are learnings from the Quad Cortex in the Nano Cortex on so many levels, in bringing in amazing people, in the engineering – but most importantly in what people want. Once you have a few tens of thousands of units out there in the world and people give you all of this feedback , there’s so much to learn. We read a lot of the comments, we’re very receptive to feedback – it may not feel like it, because some things take a long time to get ready, but we’re constantly listening to people.”
Image: Neural DSP
Francisco notes that Neural has taken a more focused approach like this before. “When we started with the plugins, there was a lot of competition around with things like Guitar Rig and Amplitube and other brands,” he says, “but for us it’s not always about the amount of features – it can be about having less features and doing it better. At least, that has always been the way that I think about product design. In the plugins that we did, it’s a fixed signal chain – in all the other products back then you could change everything. But more often than not, people just want to achieve a good sound as quickly as possible.”
“So we wanted to do something similar with the Nano Cortex. We were thinking: ‘how can we distill the essence of the Quad Cortex down?’ – and that led to some compromises on other features, on some of the more complicated things than you could do with hardware of this type. In the end, it comes to this balance of ease of use and sound quality.”
And, of course, Neural is planning on offering the Nano Cortex the same level of continued updates and support as the Quad Cortex. “Expanding the platforms has always been our priority, and we know that the unit is capable of a bit more. So we’re always exploring further with user feedback and everything.”
Tongue-in-cheek?
And speaking of feedback, that brings us on to the rather, er, unique promotional campaign that Neural ran ahead of the Nano Cortex’s launch. Neural’s marketing and online presence has always been a little edgy, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But for many, the campaign ahead of the Nano Cortex launch crossed the line into total self-indulgence.
It consisted of three 24-minute short films that were, let’s be honest, some of the worst-received guitar marketing ever released. When the first part dropped it was savaged by fans, prompting coverage from everyone from KDH to yours truly. I won’t try to summarise the videos here – and while they have to be seen to be believed, I wouldn’t really recommend you spend the time watching them, either. So what prompted the approach?
“Companies – even big companies – reflect the traits of the people that make them,” Doug says. “We take our work very seriously in terms of how good the products have to be. Our quality standards are very high. But at the same time, us as individuals, we love to have fun, and do goofy, silly things sometimes. Why would you work 60, 70 hours a week if you’re not having fun?”
“We also like to push the envelope and experiment and take risks not just with technology, but also with how we communicate,” he adds. “I think that we’re a pretty quirky company – if you look at our marketing before this video campaign we’re already doing some tongue-in-cheek things. When the comments get a bit edgy we can be edgy back, have some good banter with the user. I think this is one of the things that make us interesting and cool. We’re not a dry, boring, boring corporation in many ways.”
Quad Cortex
And so did anyone anticipate the response? “We wanted to take a chance and see what happened. It was a very intense project – we saw the videos a few days in advance, and we thought they were quite fun and funny. We weren’t thinking, ‘oh, people are gonna hate this’,” Doug says. He’s also keen to stress that no one got admonished as a result of the response to the videos, but there was a “serious post-mortem” afterwards.
“The postmortem was very important,” Francisco adds. “We were not expecting that amount of hatred and negative comments, but it taught us a lot of lessons about when to take the risk, how to take the risk, and to discuss it further before, maybe plan it differently.”
“We were trying to push the boundaries of what we had already been doing. The ‘Soon, Soon, Tomorrow’ campaign has been going for a long time, and even though it’s effective, we’ve grown a little bit tired of it as well, and I think our users have too. We wanted to give our users a little bit more content in order to participate more in the process, just have more fun and take a little bit of risk as we tried to evolve that concept.”
And, of course, Neural is taking a broadly positive view of just how much attention the launch ended up getting. “One thing that you can say objectively happened was, it was probably the most talked about release this year, right?” Doug says.
“You had to write an article about the campaign itself,” Francisco adds. “When have you had to do that before?”
Overall, Doug is pretty philosophical about the whole launch. “The worst thing you can hear when you release something you’ve invested all your time and money in is silence,” he says. “If there are people who love it, there are also people who hate it – but as long as people give it a chance. In the end, the campaign was definitely intense and controversial, but I think it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t successful.”
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