The Neural DSP Quad Cortex is undeniably one of the finest guitar amp modelers in the world. For a certain kind of gigging musician who wants to minimize bulk and doesn’t require much in the way of effects, it can pretty convincingly re-create any number of amps, and has plenty of options for bread and butter effects like delay, reverb, and chorus. Plus, its Neural Capture feature allows you to quickly and easily make bespoke presets based on your own gear, or even download captures from other users.

If you’ve got a vintage Big Muff and a Marshall half stack that you love but don’t want to drag around for simple club tours, you can create a model of your specific Marshall and Big Muff with just a few button presses on the Quad Cortex. There’s just one problem: It’s $1,699.

The Nano Cortex is Neural DSP’s effort to bring its unique capture abilities and powerful amp modeling to the masses. At $549 it’s still not cheap. You don’t get a screen, or some of the more advanced functionality from the higher-end model, but my experience tells me it could be an incredible stage and studio companion.

No Screens

The most obvious sacrifice made in the name of size and cost-cutting is that lack of a touchscreen. The Quad Cortex is an absurdly complex device that would be impenetrable without the touchscreen. The Nano Cortex strips down the feature set down enough that navigating the pedal with just a few knobs, buttons, and footswitches is reasonable.

Where the Quad Cortex provides you with more than 90 amp models, 1,000 impulse responses, and 100 different effects, the Nano sticks with the greatest hits from that massive library. It ships with 25 amp models, 300 impulse responses (IRs), and single options for chorus, delay, and reverb, based on classic pedals.

That’s still quite a lot of potential combinations to contend with, and doesn’t account for the ability to load custom captures and impulse responses that you’ve either created yourself or downloaded from other Cortex users. Navigating them can be a little confusing since the only indicators on the pedal are five LEDs over each footswitch, and all your captures and IRs are divided into color-coded banks. But if you’re primarily sticking to a few core combinations it’s not too bad.

If you find yourself wanting to switch things up a lot, there is an excellent companion app. I’ve tested a number of pedals with mobile apps and they’ve always been pretty unreliable. They’re often buggy and the Bluetooth connections are finicky at best. I had no such issues with the Cortex mobile app. It connected quickly and reliably every time, and everything worked exactly as expected.