The cab sim rule
The one rule that fixes most “it sounds bad” problems, plus how to tell whether a capture already contains a cabinet.
Cab sim on for anything full-range. Off for anything that ends in a real guitar speaker. Get this wrong and nothing else you do will help.
The rule
The IR Loader is a speaker cabinet simulation. A guitar speaker is a drastic filter — it rolls off everything above roughly 5 kHz, and without it a distorted amp signal sounds like a wasp in a tin.
So: if the thing at the end of your chain is full-range — headphones, studio monitors, an FRFR, front of house, your DAW — the Nano has to supply the speaker. Cab sim on.
If the thing at the end is a real guitar speaker, it’s already doing that job. Cab sim off.
How to turn it off
Turn Footswitch II past the last IR slot until no indicators are lit. That’s bypass.
There’s also a global IR bypass in the app’s settings, and since NanOS 2.1.0 you can bypass it per output — so one jack can feed a real cab while the other sends a cab-simmed signal to front of house. That’s genuinely useful and not widely known.
Turning the IR off often causes noticeable clipping. The IR’s low-pass was doing level management as well as tone shaping, so removing it sends a hotter, full-range signal downstream. Pull per-preset capture volume down, and consider a Low-High Cut EQ in a post slot to replace the filtering.
Forum: Nano Cortex into front of amp · Forum: turn off cab simThe double-cab problem
Here’s where it gets subtle, and where most bad-tone reports actually come from. Captures come in two kinds, and the device doesn’t reliably tell you which you have.
A capture taken from a mic’d cabinet has the cabinet permanently baked in. It cannot be separated. Run the IR Loader on top and you have two speakers in series — the result is what owners describe as “very boxed in”.
A capture taken from an amp head through a load box has no cabinet. Bypass the IR on that and you get the raspy, fizzy sound of an amp with no speaker.
The community’s own diagnostic, and the most useful sentence in the whole corpus: if the IR loader is off and it sounds bad, the capture probably doesn’t include a cab. If the IR loader is on and it sounds bad, the capture probably does include one.
Forum: amp + cab capturesPrefer amp-only captures
Where you have the choice, amp-only captures are the better buy. Neural DSP’s own position is that they’re easier to tame and give you more variation from the cab and IR settings — because you still get to choose the speaker, microphone and position.
An amp-and-cab capture is one fixed decision about all three, made by a stranger.
Which rig, which setting
The wizard below resolves every destination to concrete settings, including the warnings that matter for each one.
Leave it on
You're feeding a full-range system, so the Nano has to supply the speaker.
The simplest way to use it, and the one most people start with on day one.
- GuitarINPUT
Instrument cable
- HP OUTPUTHeadphones
3.5 mm — bring an adapter
- IR Loader
- On
- Pick a cab you like; this is most of your tone.
- Headphone volume
- HP OUT knob on the rear
- Independent of the LEVEL knob.
- Effects
- Prefer the (ST) stereo delay and reverb variants
- Noticeably better in headphones.
The headphone jack is 3.5 mm, not quarter-inch. This catches people out on the first evening.
If it sounds thin, you're hearing a close-mic'd cab with no room in front of it. Add even a little Room reverb, choose an IR position further from the cone, and low-cut around 80 Hz rather than boosting bass.
Creating Neural Captures on Nano Cortex · Forum: lush clean presetsPowering over USB while nothing else is patched in rarely hums. The noise usually appears only once you connect to other gear.
Nano Cortex power sources · Forum: background noise