Still a Nano Newbie. But there have been some audio observations when it comes to Factory vs. User Captures. As has already been noted in this forum, or any amp modeler forum, loudness levels of many “non”-NeuralDSP created user captures can be all over the place when it comes loudness levels. But when I audition NeuralDSP Captures and Presets, all of them sound perfect, or nearly perfect, both in loudness as well as frequency spectrum. This observation goes even deeper though. I have my Nano Settings set for Latching Mode, which allows the unit to display the knob LEDs exact position as saved.
So with that in mind, I noticed all Factory Preset’s, Gain, Bass, Mid, Treble are consistently at 12 noon. The FX Amount LEDs are the only ones to change. What this seems to tell me is that NeuralDSP Captures are done in a manner where the tone they’re capturing has been dialed in perfectly as far as loudness and frequency response. So it’s like, literally taking the time to get the amp/stomp/etc. sounding exactly as you want it to sound and making sure the capture process is capturing that sound identically. So there’s no real (or significant) tweaking required after the fact, because everything was dialed in before the capture occurred.
Obviously, NeuralDSP has their Capture process down to scientific perfection. And that’s what users need, a very detailed account of “How To Capture the NeuralDSP Way” A technical guide would help us users out greatly, rather than by trial and error. When I go online to the Cortex Cloud and see 13,000+ captures, I’m like, I don’t have time to audition all of these. So I start searching online to see which Cortex users get the highest praise for their captures.
Okay, enough of my rambling…seems like the Cortex has the same issues as TONEX, too many disappointing captures.
The capture block on the Nano Cortex, the slot on the unit that can load and use a Neural v1 or v2 capture, does have gain, bass, mid and treble setting that can be tweaked. However these settings aren’t stored in the capture itself rather are settings that are stored and recalled on the preset level.
So that’s why they don’t move or change when you try out various captures.
About the Neural Cloud my advice is to checkout the Neural Captures first. All are shared on their account, read the details about each capture and gainstage the preset.
Neurals Device List (for understanding the capture names)
https://neuraldsp.com/device-list
Neurals Cloud captures:
https://cloud.neuraldsp.com/cloud/u/NeuralDSP/neural-capture
“The capture block on the Nano Cortex, the slot on the unit that can load and use a Neural v1 or v2 capture, does have gain, bass, mid and treble setting that can be tweaked. However these settings aren’t stored in the capture itself rather are settings that are stored and recalled on the preset level…So that’s why they don’t move or change when you try out various captures.”
You’re right, it’s the PRESETS where the capture is tweaked. But to me, this shows how non-intuitive and challenging it can be to wrap your head around what exactly is occurring on the Nano when auditioning captures and presets.
However, I need to make some clarification about the Factory Presets, since everything is all intertwined. My observation has been that when auditioning Factory Presets, the Gain, Bass, Mid, and Treble LED indicators do not change, only the FX Amount parameter LEDs change value. So if my description is accurate, NeuralDSP does not use those parameters to tweak their captures used with their Factory Presets. That’s why the LEDs on those parameters always display at 12 noon. You can see this for yourself while editing with Cortex Cloud. Select each Factory Preset and take notice that all LEDs remain at 12 noon (except for the FX, that changes). To verify this further, load a Factory Preset, then tweak all the parameters to where the LEDs are not positioned at 12 noon, but don’t save the preset, select another Factory Preset, LEDs all display at 12 noon. Now reselect the Factory Preset you tweaked earlier (but didn’t save), all the LEDs are at 12 noon.
So, this behavior is “part” of what I was observing. But I took that a step further (in my mind) and it dawned on me that if the Factory Presets all load with parameter values at 12 noon, then NeuralDSP Factory Captures are captured with such precision that there is no need to tweak their captures when they create Factory Presets. The only real tweaking done on Factory Presets is through the FX blocks. But they still allow you to tweak their captures.
I’m sure I’m over analyzing this, as I do with most music gear, but all of my thinking was trying to discern why so many User Created Captures sound so drastically different from the NeuralDSP ones.
The factory captures in your Nano Cortex has been carefully selected by Neural to give a very pleasant experience. The captures you can find on the Cortex Cloud are not. Even the captures made by Neural are more “all over the place”.
Exactly, you summed up my observations and experience perfectly. I agree, the Default Factory Presets and Captures that come with the Nano are very well done. So much so, that I’ve made a list of the Presets and Captures I liked best, which was mostly all of them. In fact, I was so impressed that I was excited to hit the Cortex Cloud to audition additional NeuralDSP Captures, only to experience disappointment and confusion. How could NDSP’s Cloud Captures be so “all over the place” as we’ve both noticed.
I haven’t dismissed auditioning Cortex Cloud captures, but I came to realize that the best approach (and quickest) for creating great sounding presets would be to tweak and modify the default factory ones. I guess I’ve grown accustomed to downloading complete rigs/presets like on the FM3 and Tone Master Pro. But those units are modelers vs NDSP captures.
Thinking about the Nano, I was expecting to go online and download some more great sounding NDSP created “presets” just to find out, it’s only captures which can be downloaded and not presets. I would like to think that the ability to share presets with their specific captures is something all users desire. And perhaps in a future update, the Nano will have that functionality.
Actually I think that a lot of amp captures in the Capture Cloud are very well done but they don’t match my guitar, my guitar pickups and my lacking know-how for gain staging and preset building.
Take the “Brit 1987” series of amp captures by Neural for example. If you preview them on the Nano you’ll likely get a quite loud and bumpy ride.
I think the “Brit 1987 6” suits my LP with humbuckers very nicely and the “Brit 1987 5” is more crunch making them a great pair for “clean” and “crunch” through an 412 Brit TB impulse response.
So does this mean that the rest of the captures are poorly made? No, this was made by Neural with their latest v2 capture tech. Surely other people are loving and using the other captures in the “Brit 1987” series.