“Master of the Universe,” my demo song showing some of what the Quad Cortex mini can do.

Captured

When it comes to recording, you don’t have to worry about wiring this thing up to your audio interface; just connect it to your computer with a USB-C cable, and it becomes a 24-bit, 48 KHz interface. (On Macs, this is class compliant and needs no driver; it even works with iOS devices. Neural makes the necessary driver for Windows.)

The Quad Cortex mini shows up with a host of inputs, making it simple to record, say, both a dry electric guitar track and a heavily effected one at the same time. If you change your mind about the sound later, you can always “re-amp” the dry signal by routing it back out to the device and recording it with different settings. You can even track mics through this thing, thanks to an XLR input and (for condenser mics) support for phantom power.

The Quad Cortex mini can also make its own captures of gear you either own or happen across. This can happen in two ways: 1) on the device or 2) in the cloud.

The device-based system, which the company calls “Neural Capture Version 1,” requires you to hook up your gear to both an output (to play the system’s test tones) and an input on the mini. (Note: Do not, under ANY circumstances, connect the actual speaker outputs from a tube amp directly to the mini. The power level is far too high.)

Various known sounds are then played through this loop, and the mini’s software analyzes the differences between the sound it sent and the sound it received. The machine-learning algorithms for this run locally on the device. Neural says that the Capture 1 system can handle overdrive pedals, amps, and cabs.

The newer system, called Neural Capture Version 2, is “an advanced evolution of Neural Capture trained via Cortex Cloud,” says the company. “This option provides even higher-resolution Captures, making it especially powerful for touch-sensitive devices like fuzzes, compressors, and certain styles of amps.” Capture 2 is said to be capable of modeling “subtle behaviors like volume-knob cleanup, amp sag and bloom, fast transients, and blend controls.”