Your first fifteen minutes

Power, hookup, the factory presets, capture banks — and the button combo that explains why your knobs seem dead.

Lesson 02 of 108 min

The short version

Get a real sound before you change anything. Then learn two things: how to scroll captures, and how to unlock the panel.

Power it properly, first time

Power is the most common source of problems that look like faults, so it’s worth getting right before anything else.

DC jack: 9–12 V, 600 mA minimum, centre-negative, 2.1/5.5 mm. A Quad Cortex supply works.
Or USB-C at 5 V and 1.5 A minimum, from a genuinely USB-C-compliant source.
USB-A will not power it. Data works; current doesn’t.
A USB-C cable is in the box. The DC supply usually isn’t.

Watch out

If anything else is plugged into the pedal, prefer the DC jack. Powering over USB-C while running unbalanced cables to other gear is the documented number-one cause of hum on this device. Undersized supplies — anything at 500 mA — cause intermittent glitches that read like a hardware fault.

Nano Cortex power sources · Forum: power supply for the Nano Cortex

Make a sound

Guitar into INPUT. Headphones into HP OUTPUT — note that’s a 3.5 mm mini-jack, so bring an adapter. Set level with the HP OUT knob on the rear, which is independent of the LEVEL knob on top.

It powers on into Performance Mode. Before you touch a single knob, play all four factory presets: Footswitch I toggles between IA and IB, Footswitch II toggles IIA and IIB. Those four are the only presets reachable by foot.

Learn to scroll captures — this is the real control

Now the thing that isn’t obvious from any photograph: both footswitches are rotary encoders. You can turn them.

Turn Footswitch I and you scroll through Neural Captures. Turn Footswitch II and you scroll through cabinets. Press BANK to move between the five capture banks. That combination — turn, and change bank — is how you actually choose a sound on this device, and it’s worth ten minutes of just doing it.

Start with the 25 captures already on the pedal rather than downloading from the cloud. They’re curated, consistent in level, and set with parameters at noon. Downloading two hundred cloud captures on day one is the fastest route to a library where half the content is unusable.

MusicRadar review · Forum: volume levels not saving between presets

Drawn to match the hardware. Every control is where it actually sits on the chassis.

Knobs

Buttons

Footswitches

Indicators

Footswitch I

Review

Step on it for presets. Turn it to scroll captures — it's a rotary encoder.

What it does

Tap: Toggles between presets IA and IB.; Nano Cortex User Manual 2.2.0
Turn: Scrolls through Neural Captures. This is the primary way you audition sounds.; Nano Cortex User Manual 2.2.0 · Sound On Sound review
Hold: Enters Tempo Mode, then tap to set tempo. The LED blinks at the tempo, and goes blue when locked to incoming MIDI clock.; Nano Cortex User Manual 2.2.0 · NanOS 2.1.0 release notes
TapCapture Mode: A/Bs between your new capture (LED green) and the real device (LED off).; Creating Neural Captures on Nano Cortex
TurnCapture save: Selects the destination slot within the bank.; Creating Neural Captures on Nano Cortex

Worth knowing

Watch out

Both footswitches are rotary encoders you can also step on. Nothing else on the pedal works this way and it is invisible in every photograph of it — if you only ever step on them, you're missing how the device is meant to be driven.

Sound On Sound review · Nano Cortex User Manual 2.2.0

Presets fire on release rather than on press, so that press-and-hold can address tuner and tempo on the same two switches. It reads as lag, there's no setting to change it, and it hurts accuracy when starting a looper.

Forum: the “delayed” footswitch

When your knobs do nothing

Two settings make the panel feel broken, and both catch people out.

Parameter Lock disables the knobs and footswitches so nothing changes by accident on stage. Hold EXIT for three seconds to toggle it. This is common enough that Neural DSP put it in their FAQ.

Knob Operation Mode can be set to Latching, where a knob does nothing until it passes through its stored value. Sweep it through its full range and it’ll pick up.

Find the tuner

Hold Footswitch II for two seconds. There’s no screen, so the tuner reads on the LED rings: flat animates leftward, sharp animates rightward, and MID and TREBLE blink fast when you’re in tune. Hold Footswitch II for another second to mute the input.

What to do next

You now have a sound and you can change it. The next lesson is the app, because on a device with no screen almost everything else — choosing which effects load, editing them, finding captures, renaming presets — lives there.