The Quad Cortex hands you a touchscreen, four rows of routing and several thousand possible signal paths, and then leaves you to work out where to start. This is the walkthrough I give every new owner: how the directory is organised, how to build a patch from a blank preset, how to save and tag it so you can find it again, and the two swipe gestures that hide the most useful screens on the unit.
Understand how the directory is organised
Tap the title of your current preset and you'll drop into the directory. The structure goes in three layers. At the top are set lists, and you can have up to ten of them. Inside each set list are your preset banks — up to 32 per set list. Each bank then holds eight presets. So a preset lives at an address like 3A: bank three, first slot. Once that hierarchy clicks, the rest of the unit stops feeling arbitrary.
Get comfortable in grid view
Most of your time on the Quad Cortex will be spent in grid view, and it's worth being honest about that up front. Grid view is where you add device blocks, reorder your effects chain, drop in splitters and mixers to route signal to different destinations, and set your inputs and outputs. It is the overview of whatever patch you currently have loaded, and it's the screen you customise from.
Find the system settings behind the three dots
The three-dotted button in the top right corner opens the system menu. In here you'll find options to create a new preset, your MIDI out options, save-as, and the controls to edit the details of a preset once you've finalised it. Neural Capture lives here too.
There's also a Settings entry, and this is the one worth knowing. It takes you to your device settings — the global parameters that apply to everything on the unit, not just the patch you're on. If you've come from BOSS products, this is what you'd call the system settings. Device update, free disk space and device brightness all live here.
Learn the three footswitch modes
Back in grid view you can change the footswitch mode, and there are three. Preset mode switches between your different presets. Scene mode keeps the same preset loaded but lets you move between different states of it — switching several blocks on and off together in one press. Stomp mode turns individual device blocks in the current patch on and off, the way you'd expect a pedalboard to behave.
You can change mode on the touchscreen, but you can also do it by pressing two footswitches simultaneously — which means you can do it with your feet, mid-set, without bending down.
Add your first device blocks
With a blank preset loaded, tap on the effects chain in grid view and you'll get the device list. Add your amplifier first — there's a plethora of amp models in there, and my pick is the Brit Lead 900, right at the top of the list.
Then you'll want a cabinet to go with it. Go into the cab section and choose Guitar (there are bass cabinets in there as well, just as there are bass amplifiers). I go for the 4x12 Brit Silver — another one of my preferred models on this unit. Repeat that same process for your overdrives, your delays and anything else you want in the chain. If you want to move a block, just click and drag it on the display.
Set your inputs and outputs
At the beginning and the end of your effects chain sit the input and output options. On the input you can choose input one or input two, and you can also use the returns from the send and return jacks to bring additional instruments in. You can route via USB as well, which is genuinely versatile once you're working in the studio.
The output gives you the same style of choice — you're determining the output source for that particular row. For a simple setup I'll take input one and send it to outputs three and four, so I can use ordinary guitar jack cables.
Use all four rows if you need them
The grid is split into four rows, and each row can output to a different destination. Row one to output one, row two to output two, and so on. That sounds like an edge case until you consider the obvious use for it: four separate amplifier instances loaded in, with your whole band running through a single unit. It's completely doable.
Tweak parameters with the screen, not the dials
Select the device block you want to alter and you'll see all its parameters. You can adjust them with the rotary dials on the footswitches themselves, and plenty of people do. I don't. I click and pull up on the screen to increase a value — gain, for example — and pull down to decrease it. It's simply quicker than reaching for the little dials, though that's a personal preference rather than a rule. When you're happy, press Done.
Save and tag your preset properly
The floppy disk icon in the top right corner opens the save menu. Give the preset a name, and then — this is the part people skip — give it tags.
Tags are what make the directory searchable later. If you play in four different bands, tag each preset with the band name. If a patch belongs to a particular project or album you tracked in the studio, tag it with that. Back in the directory, type the tag into the search and every preset carrying it appears at once, ready to load. It takes five seconds at save time and saves you scrolling blindly through banks a year later.
Tip: Tag presets at the moment you save them, not "later". A tagged preset is findable in one search; an untagged one is lost among 32 banks of eight.
Know that your input level is global
Slide down on the touchscreen and you'll land in the I/O settings. This is where you set the input level for your instrument and the output level of your XLRs, so you're not clipping the mixer or whatever sits at the end of your chain.
Here's the thing to be aware of, and it's a shame: the master input level is global. Change input one on one preset, switch to a preset in another bank, and it's still set to whatever you just changed it to. If you play a guitar with hot active pickups and another with single coils, that means adjusting the input level every time you swap.
The workaround is to dedicate the inputs. Put your Les Paul permanently on input one and your Stratocaster on input two, with separate jack cables, and set each input's level once. Some other digital modellers let you store input settings per patch so you can just plug the next guitar in and forget about it. This one doesn't, so plan around it.
Swipe up for gig view
Swipe up on the touchscreen and you get gig view, which has three views of its own. Preset shows all the presets you currently have loaded. Scene shows the different instances of the preset you're on. And Stomp — probably my favourite view on the whole device — gives you a colourful representation of everything currently mapped to your footswitches, so you can see at a glance which block is on and which is off. On a dark stage, that clarity is worth a great deal.