Replace board with Nano Cortex?

Community
1

Peace, everyone.

Long time visitor, first time posting.

I have a question that I’ve been asking myself for a few days. Should I replace my pedalboard with a Nano Cortex?

The Pros: Much less gear to move around.

Ability to save presets and switch between them quickly. Audio interface as a bonus.

Can practice silently with a very compact setup. Will work better for “fly-dates”. Also offers bass amps. Not to mention the capture tech, which although I don’t have an immediate use for now, I may later.

The cons: I have to get used to it. I am very accustomed to my board, but I can do my best to be open, and I will devote time to learning whatever equipment I buy. Other than that, I see very few real cons.

So from that perspective my mind is pretty made up, however, I made this post to include the thoughts of this community, as I imagine there are many musicians present here with much experience with the Nano Cortex.

For context: I am a full time guitarist, bassist, songwriter, and home studio producer. I play for 2 church services weekly, one which requires an amp-less setup. Many of my other freelance gigs require or benefit from an amp-less rig also.

My home studio space is a 10 x 12, and I live in a small home. I constantly seek minimalism when it comes to gear for storage reasons. I also move around a lot for studio sessions, gigs, etcetera.

My current board is as follows:

Polytune 2 mini > Lehle Mono Volume S > Cry Baby Jr. Wah Wah > Strymon Sunset Dual Overdrive > Universal Audio Del Verb > Strymon Iridium mounted to a Pedaltrain Metro 24 and powered by a Cioks Sol.

They are pricey pedals and sound wonderful, but lack a little of the flexibility that the NC provides.

I find myself suffering from “tap dancing syndrome” often. Lol! There are plenty of tunes I play that require a quick transition from a lead sound to a clean rhythm sound. Furthermore, there are things I can do without…the volume pedal is a luxury that I use sparsely, and everything else, in my understanding, can be replicated by the Nano Cortex.

So there’s my post. Thank you for your patience, I know it is rather lengthy. I’m hoping for some of you good folks to chime in and perhaps give me your thoughts— whether it be a green light to go ahead, an illumination of an oversight on my part, or something I cannot foresee.

Thank you for your time, Neural DSP community.

Signed,

Afresh Windfalls

2

Really depends. You won’t have any amp models on the Nano. It’s just captures for the amp sounds. I see you mentioned thinking the Nano has bass amp models, which is doesn’t not have any amp models. Only captures, so you’re tied to whatever ones you might find that fit the sound you’re looking for. Which personally, feels way too confusing to sift through. Would rather have the amp model than sifting through thousands of random captures.

Also do you need many different sounds per song? The QC might be your best bet if you have a lot of effect changes. You can use scenes, which the QC can 8 of per preset. Navigating scenes with the Nano is a lot more difficult, and you’re much more limited by the amount of them. By the time you add a midi footswitch it would be as big as a QC with much less flexibility. The Nano has access to four sounds via the footswitches at once. The way they have it laid out is pretty clunky, esp compared to the QC. Tbh I don’t understand why they expect people to do that all with two footswitches. It’s super confusing and limited.

You’re also limited to a smaller effect library and signal chain for the Nano. It’s worth researching if the effects that are on the nano would be right for you. You’ll also want to consider there isn’t any screen on the Nano and you would have to navigate it with your phone, iPad, etc.

Not sure if the Nano fully fixed the gaps between presets or scenes. Been seeing some complaints about gaps, so that’s worth researching as well.

With the info you have mentioned, personally I would let suggest a Nano. I would suggest the actual QC. It’s way more flexible, and really not that big at all. Still super easy to transport, way better UI, more effects+routing for all your scenarios, can use models and captures, plus it can run stereo signal chains easier, multiple inputs, can run a vocal mic if you ever need, etc. I feel you would hit the threshold of the Nano super easily and wish you got the Quad instead with all the uses you need it for.

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View it this way -

nano cortex is your amp+cab with a few common effects for convenience.

quad cortex is your amp+cab+pedal board replacement.

if you pick the NC, know that with a goal of pedal board replacement you may be forced to do it a certain way but it will be possible.

If you pick the QC you have more than enough at your fingertips without hesitation but you’ll spend a pretty penny more for a number of things you may want but dont need.

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Well, I would say keep your amp and board but use NC for gigs.
However, …. I do not see any pedals that are hard to replace with NC.
Meaning.., you could those sounds from NC. Even though I do not have it, Universal Audio Del Verb might be tough to match but then again, it depends how you use the reverb & delay. I think NC has a pretty good analog delay and a good reverb. More might be added down the road.

So, I’d say go for it.

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No. I’m just learning (the hard way) that you can’t edit presets on the Nano Cortex without an internet connection. This restriction was apparently added in recent firmware updates. I just received an NC for exactly this experiment so that I can go to my fly gigs without checking a zillion dollars worth of overweight gear. I captured tones successfully last night from my main rig and got two presets configured (all with internal effects) that can get me through most of a set. Fantastic! That’s when I started getting “Something unexpected happened” errors in the Cortex Cloud app. Now I can’t even save changes to my profile.

So next steps for me should be to go to my practice space and try these patches I’ve made (using headphones) through a PA to make sure they sound acceptable. Unfortunately the practice space is deep in a facility where I don’t have access to WiFi, so I won’t be able to finish setting up EQ, etc. It’s extremely common to tweak EQ during sound check. And it’s also common to have connectivity issues at venues.

Suggestions I’ve found include “bring a EQ pedal” which makes your NC rig more unwieldy than a one-box solution like a QC (or something from the Helix family) This is unacceptable. Particularly if you’re going to get carried away and bring a separate MIDI controller to access more that 4 presets live. I love my Morningstar MC6, but by the time that and an EQ pedal have you gig-ready you’re carrying a full pedal board THAT YOU CAN’T TWEAK WITHOUT AN INTERNET CONNECTION.

Even if you have perfect internet connectivity everywhere you play, you will be dependent on Neural DSP maintaining their cloud with 100% reliability forever. It’s night 1 for me, and I’m having connection problems. what happens in 3 years when Nano Cortex 2 comes out and the company doesn’t support this one anymore? They just brick this one? Nope

So no. Do not replace your pedal board with this thing. Its dependence on an internet connection means it is not robust enough for gigging, and not even guaranteed to work tomorrow if the company goes away or EOLs cloud support. I wish I knew this before I bought the thing.

1 Like
6

Agree with every word. I have a NC but no way to gig with this internet restriction. I’d like didn’t have brought it. Never I’ll think that a product like this have this restriction. So, i brought and now waiting for some months for the app update without internet restriction. After some months, if the update does not come, I’ll try another portable solution and sell my NC. My main board (beekeeper, para eq empress, superdelayVM, flint and two notes cab m+) is perfect for the music I play, and NC is just a possible second board for portability. So, I woldn’t replace my pedal board with NC, until neuraldsp send some signals that it will be usefull on future.

Note that sometimes, there is a problem with servers, internet, etc that we have to use a vpn (you can find in this forum). So, what happens if in a gig you have to make some changes in preset and you have to open a vpn, wait connect, etc, etc?

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Hey, if you believe in this scheme of features request, please vote in making NC control independent of internet. There are 3 topics. I asked the moderators to merge but they didn’t merged yet.

1 Like
8

I read your post and and thinking the same thing. I have a full sized QC. I also use the Strymon Sunset - fantastic overdrive! I set up a QC grid with ONLY effects and put that in front of my Divx13 CJ11 (4-knob) tube amp. Happy to report - the overdrives are really excellent! I would always expect the modulation and verbs etc to be great but Overdrive is something Im picky about. So far so good - still tweaking. I would LOVE MORE overdrive to choose from though. Smoother and creamier ones for sure. The Nobel’s copy is great for classic rock. One more note: I had the Fractal FM3 and tried that in front of a tube amp and even with Modelling set to global “off”. I had tone suck. Happy to say, QC does not have that issue and there is no global “toggle” you have to remember between amp vs. modeling use cases. Happy camper here!

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Well… the internet dependence has been recently fixed. Now you can tweak what you want, anywehere. The effects in your signal chain are easily obtainable with the NC. Strymon stuff is hard to replicate with the same quality, but you´d have very decent alternatives.

You could even capture your full signal chain (except time based effects). Overdrives, plus strymon Iridium, plus reverb… all in the same capture. You can make it in a few minutes.

Apart from that, you´d have compressors, modulations… not a very extensive effects library but certainly a lot more than those you hace currently in your pedalboard.

Preset management should require only 4 presets… unless you use a MIDI controller to recall more presets.

MIDI is still a little buggy. NDSP have to polish it a little more.

As soon as they fix MIDI bugs and add the V2 capturing capability (now you can play V2 captures, but not make them), it´ll be a quite powerful miniature device. And it sounds amazing (V2 can even capture compressors or fuzzes, and they are really well recreated).

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One of the problems using the nano cortex as a pedalboard replacement is the status LEDs are incredibly difficult to see while playing.

You cannot tell what fx blocks are enabled when toggling via midi. All of this intelligence needs to be kept in your midi controller.

The add on requirements grow and eventually you’re back at a full QC in costs and or footprint.

IMO, ymmv, of course

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I think with the luminite m1 and the additional 6 button footswitch, you have all you ever need. I use the top 3 + the nc to change presets and the bottom 3 to change the fx per preset. It can be programmed to show different fx per preset.

The biggest problem is the preset switching gap and the missing spring reverb for me. But it’s very small, can be driven by battery and gets the job done easily

1 Like
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I’m in the process of doing this exact thing ( trying to replace my analog board an NC). Ive had some success thus far with just a midi controller NC and an Exp pedal. For me I think the best approach is build presets using one amp / cab capture and tailor it to each tune in the set. I might add a boost and king of tone.

I programmed midi switches to turn on/turn off NC fx. I think some of the V2 captures sound really good.