Guitar Gear Forum

I wanted to see what all the hype was about and I'm really liking it.

TL;DR - The baby cortex is great but extremely limited in scope/functions but serves as an outstanding "amp in a box" to pair with your favorite drive/effects pedals.

I didn't watch any of the videos and I don't really follow Neural on YT or social media so I was totally unaware of any of the drama with the pre-announcement videos/movies or whatever they were.

Story time: Our singer and bassist both have been using quad cortexes for a couple years and I spent about a month with the singer's unit to setup all the patches, sounds, etc for our shows and got to know it. It was good but I didn't bother with the capture tech because of some weird ground loop I was having in my studio (it turns out it was my old interface) but the amp models were good enough and, to me, not as impressive as what was in my AxeFX III but still pretty good.

I setup some stuff for our singer and that was that and had no real interest in pursuing it any further because there was no software interface and no plugins at the time and that was a huge turn off for me as setting up everything on the unit itself was a huge chore.


Fast forward to about a month ago and I got the QC again from the singer to check out the latest updates with the plugins, software, etc and I also tried out some of the captures and I was really impressed but still didn't feel like I had any real need for it but I was coming around.

After I saw that the baby quartex got announced and that it could do amp capture and toggle 4 presets, I was actually really intrigued because IDGAF about built in drives or all the effects and all that. I just was interested in doing captures and potentially having a nice sounding amp in a box that I could pair with my favorite pedals and after spending about a week with it now, I gotta say, I'm impressed.

The captures I've done so far are dead nuts accurate and FEEL accurate too which was one of the biggest things I liked about the kemper but these are much more accurate than what I was able to get from the Kemper.



This is the rig for the gig this weekend. I've run through our setlist and have my Nitro's OD1 channel captured using that on one bank and then dialed back to a low gain light crunch for the second bank. Toggle between the two is seamless/gapless. HX stomp is doing reverb, delay, chorus, solo boost and if needed some EQ. One output to the PA/IEM's and the other to an FRFR behind me.



It puts me mentally into a weird spot because up until now, I've really enjoyed the flexibility and deep editing capabilities of my FM3 and I absolutely loved the simplicity, ease of use and great out of the box sounds that the Fender TMP delivered but with all the modelers, I've always tried to dial in as close of an approximation of the sound of my amps/cabs as I can using the models in the units themselves but this dinky little box here is legit spitting THE sound of my mic'd up studio tone and it FEELS right. It's weird hearing that sound without actually hearing or feeling the 4x12 in the closet of my studio rumbling but it's like something in my brain immediately switched like "These are the sounds I've been trying to get out of the Helix, Fractals, our singer's QC and the TMP but never could." I could come kinda close but never THE actual sound of my gear.

I've got a bad feeling that I'm eventually going to cave and some gear is about to be liquidated to jump on the full size QC just so I can consolidate some space on my board...A gateway drug for sure.

Oh and the head only capture of the nitro going to my powerstation and cab sounds ridiculous too.

Cool man I'll watch the video when I'm in front of my computer monitors.

But to play devil's advocate here, this reads like every post every time a new modeler/profiler etc is released: yeah finally the real tone/feel!!!

But then it isn't because a new version comes around and THAT one is the real deal. It's been going on since 98-ish. So color me skeptical.

But on the other hand, they HAVE been getting better, so there's that. But I've tried the full size QC and I thought it sounded great for what it is, but wouldn't replace my worst amp for it.

I've been using the IR-D for when I need DI and that's the closest I've heard so far to a tone I like, but that's a tube preamp at the end of the day. And even then, it's not the same as my amps. So

Have you tried the ToneX? I'm curious how those two compare.

I thought these were super dumb at first, but I guess I vaguely get it

My bass player just grabbed a full size QC last week, first time I've ever seen any NDSP in the real world. Seems pretty neat I like the touch screen

spawnofthesith wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2024 8:44 pm I thought these were super dumb at first, but I guess I vaguely get it

My bass player just grabbed a full size QC last week, first time I've ever seen any NDSP in the real world. Seems pretty neat I like the touch screen

I 100% understand why people were pissed about this product. $1800 is a lot to spend on a piece of gear whether its a fractal or helix or QC or tone master and it seems like everyone wanted a stomp HX version of the QC where you could still do a lot of stuff the QC could do but just maybe half the size and DSP power.

Neural did a horrible job with the marketing on this thing and if they'd have just come out and said that it's basically an amp in a box that can load any existing capture, create new captures and has some basic effects to get you by if you don't need anything fancy and 4 presets, I think it would have been better received.

I forced myself to watch whatever that marketing video was and they were hyping it up like it was the second coming of Christ so no wonder people had much higher expectations.

Great video. The Nitro capture sounds awesome. I've been curious to add the Nano to my HX stomp, like you have done.
Have you noticed any change in feel when going through the loop of the stomp, as opposed to straight into the Nano?
Thanks!

The HX stomp isn't totally transparent but once I got the level at unity gain, the difference with/without the HX stomp is basically imperceptible.