Hi,
I own the Quad Cortex for quite a while now. I am very pleased with the sounds Im getting out of it. Probably the best piece of gear I ever purchased, guitars not included.
I made some (to me) great sounding captures of my Engl Savage 60. Especially with the York Audio Mesa IRs these captures sound great.
I was wondering if it is possible to capture just the preamp section of an amp by using the fx loop´s send output of the amp into the Quad Cortex. There are quite a lot of power amp captures on the device by default. It might be interesting to mix the Engl preamp with a KT88 power amp for example.
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Yes it is possible. I have done a bunch of preamp captures of my 3rd Power Citizen Gain CSR.
I also made a capture of the power amp in my 3rd Power.
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Thank you very much. Did you go through the standard capture process? FX Loop Send from the amp to capture in?
Is there anything to watch out for regarding the levels?
Did you upload your captures to the cloud? I would like to hear your results.
Edit: Found your captures, I will give them a try later.
Edit2: Holy sh*t your 3Ppreamp gaintight capture sounds awesome. Thanks for sharing!
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Hmm I’ve gotta try your captures. I love 3rd power amps, played a few in Nashville. Rawk!!!
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Yes I followed the standard procedure.
Just connected to input of the amp and out of the effects loop.
I’m glad you liked it! 
Yeah, the 3rd Power amp is an amazing amp!
I’m pretty new to this too, I just have had the QC for a couple of weeks. So hopefully the captures will be even better.
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I agree 3rd Power makes fantastic amps! I’ve had mine for 5 years and it’s been to every gig since I’ve got it.
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I will keep my eyes open for your next captures:) Would be nice to have a capture of the complete amp as a comparison. And as a spacesaver for the grid.
To be honest I never heard of that brand before. Another big plus for the Cortex. Finding captures of amps you wouldn´t hear otherwise.
Thanks again. I am going to capture my Engl preamp this weekend.
I love that amp. They are not so common. I actually had to convince a guitar shop in Sweden to become a dealer for 3rd Power so I could buy one. They are hand build in Nashville.
I will make some captures of the complete amp hopefully this weekend or next week. And if I have some time I will also make captures of my Olsson Little Hill (Fredrik Åkesson from Opeth, signature amp)
I must try your Engl captures.
I know I am late to the party - but essentially I can capture my preamps as amp heads from the fx send instead of having to buy something like Two notes or whatever??
I understand that will skip the power section obviously and we’d need a power soak to get DI out
But I am mostly interested for now in capturing my preamps and then using QC cabs. Any insights appreciated!
The preamp is more like a gain pedal, and you can capture it similarly, the “amp” is the poweramp section.
A full rig has a preamp, power amp, then cab. Not having a power amp section may make it sound different but may be doable as you dont acrually need the “power” to drive a cab.
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Thanks that’s what I thought - imma give it a shot. I was like the signal’s gotta be line level so may be we can capture that. I’ll report back!
You could just plug your head into a cab. If you’re capturing the preamp (assuming the amp has an effects loop) you won’t get any sound out of the cab when you capture just the preamp. Since the power amp isn’t getting any signal from the preamp. You only need a load box if you’re capturing the power amp as well
Thanks - that’s a great idea. That’ll let me crank master a bit without annoying neighbours.
TBH I am trying to capture my Mesa amp because that’s the only one I need specific eq settings for.
The captures I find for Mesa Mark series are just hard V eq’ed. If I can get a good quality capture I’d like to upload that on cortex cloud.
If you’re capturing just the preamp, then the master has no influence on the preamp tone
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