Neural DSP releases the Nano Cortex capture pedal

February 1, 2025 · 2 sources

Neural DSP released the Nano Cortex, a guitar amp modeling and capture pedal, in February 2025, according to a Sound On Sound review published that month¹. The review describes it as both more compact and more affordable than the company's Quad Cortex¹.

The pedal uses Neural DSP's Neural Capture technology, which the review says uses neural networks to learn and digitally replicate the sounds of amps, drive pedals and combinations of drive pedal, amplifier, loudspeaker and microphone¹. It has no screen; feedback comes from four rows of five LEDs on the top panel¹. The top panel carries two momentary buttons, rotary gain and EQ controls and twin footswitches, each footswitch with a continuous rotary encoder, and each knob surrounded by a segmented LED ring showing its setting in the recalled preset¹.

The rear panel has quarter-inch balanced TRS jacks for the mono instrument input, mono/stereo output and an expression pedal that doubles as a MIDI I/O port, plus a ground-lift switch, a mini-jack headphone output with volume control and a USB-C port¹. Over USB-C it works as a 4-in/3-out 24-bit/48kHz USB 2 audio and MIDI interface for Mac, Windows, iOS or iPadOS, and can send up to 12 Program Change and/or continuous controller messages per footswitch press and per preset recall¹. It can draw power from a computer's USB-C port but not from older USB A ports; otherwise it needs an external 600mA, 9-12 V DC supply, a 5V/2A USB-C charger or a power bank¹. A side-panel combi XLR/TRS Capture Input has an adjacent 26dB boost switch, and the unit does not supply phantom power, expecting a passive dynamic mic¹.

It ships with 25 amp-only captures, 20 for guitar and five for bass, in five banks of five, and stores up to 256 captures in an onboard user library¹. It gives direct access to five of 10 pre-loaded factory IRs and can store and load a further 256 IRs¹. The signal path has seven slots: Adaptive Noise Gate and Transpose before the capture slot, then the IR loader, then chorus, delay and reverb¹.

The review gives no price. A Guitar World review of the Boss GX-10, published separately, lists the Nano Cortex at $549².