Neural DSP Quad Cortex Mini VS Darkglass Anagram

[wolffire99]

Had the Anagram for a few months and sold it for the QC mini mostly because I was frustrated with the screen size and lack of good modulation effects in the Anagram so I thought I’d share some random thoughts having used both if someone is on the fence.

Octave tracking is better in the Anagram. My one knock on the QC mini is some octave’s track perfectly and some don’t and I don’t understand why that is.

Cortex Cloud is amazing and really what the Anagram is missing most. Being able to pull up any capture or preset I can think of on my phone and instantly send it to the QC is incredible.

There are less stock bass amp and cab sims in the QC but they sound better and more realistic. The sims in the Anagram sounded like a slightly exaggerated version of amp/cab it was emulating.

If you’re into modulation, reverb, and time based effects the Anagram isn’t remotely close (yet) but that’s never been darkglass’s thing.

Having a 4th footswitch makes a BIG difference. I was going to have to get some kind of MIDI controller for the Anagram but with 4 foot switches and the ability to long press into 4 additional scenes/stomps, I don’t need one with the QC mini.

Making a capture with the Anagram required setting up two different sends into a DAW and uploading to a third party website. With the QC I plug a pedal in to the capture loop and press go, 3-5 minutes later, done.

Lastly, screen size. In live use, the Anagram is hard for me to read and adjust. It can be annoying even at home as blocks are easily moved around by accident. In gig mode, the mini is easily read from a distance. Darkglass needs to come up with something similar for the Anagram.

Hope this doesn’t sound like I’m ragging on the Anagram. It sounded great and I LOVED the octave options but just a few things that were overly annoying and made me want to switch.

 

[eyvindwa]

I’ve been using the Anagram for about 4 months now, have had the OG QC for ~5 years (selling to one of my guitarists), and now the QCm for 2 weeks.

I’m really leaning toward the QCm. For the tones I need 99.9% of the time, Parallax is utter perfection. It gives me clean, aggressively clean, clean and fat, gritty, overdriven, vintagey overdriven, prog metal drive (eg. Jacob Umansky), raging distortion, all out fuzz, and anything in between.

And it does it so well and so easily in a single block without fussing with a whole chain of effects. It’s just too d@mn good!

The platform is much more mature, and for what it lacks in amp/cab sims there is a plethora of great captures available. Personally, I don’t need them but it’s nice to know they’re there if I ever do.

Additionally, Parallax is also a plugin available in the DAW so I can use the same tone and presets recording at home, or jamming at my guitarist’s house without bringing the QCm at all, or live of course. This is a really cool benefit I get a LOT of use out of. I recently heard from DG there are no near-future plans to port over Entropia to a plugin.

What it really comes down to that I’ve come to realize these past weeks is:

- When I try to dial in Entropia on the Anagram, I’m constantly struggling to get the sound I’m looking for. It takes a lot of EQ adjustments, cab sim and mic searching, harmonic enriching, general experimenting, a lot of blocks…

- When I open up Parallax and start playing, it just puts a smile on my face every time, and it’s so easy to dial in. I get immediately excited and literally play sometimes just to hear the tone

Just my quick opinion and experience and takeaways for my tonal goals bearing in mind that my gigs these days are basically all modern metal and aggressive genres and that I’m not interested in the cover band scene any longer that I did for ~25 years so YMMV.

I'm receiving my QCm this evening (I hope!!!), and I've read through the threads with interest. For me as well, the Parallax was an important deciding factor in going for the QCm over the Anagram.

One thing that I have seen people complaining about, however, is that it is difficult to use the Parallax in a typical situation where you send one signal to FOH with the full Parallax tone, and another signal without the cabsim part of the Parallax going to a real stage amplifier and cabinet. Do you have any experience with this? Any tricks to know of in advance?

Thanks!

 

[Scott McArron]

I'm receiving my QCm this evening (I hope!!!), and I've read through the threads with interest. For me as well, the Parallax was an important deciding factor in going for the QCm over the Anagram.

One thing that I have seen people complaining about, however, is that it is difficult to use the Parallax in a typical situation where you send one signal to FOH with the full Parallax tone, and another signal without the cabsim part of the Parallax going to a real stage amplifier and cabinet. Do you have any experience with this? Any tricks to know of in advance?

Thanks!

Hey! Some additional feedback info from my band is that they like Parallax more than the distortions I was able to put together with Entropia. Although that probably says more about my abilities to craft the tone I’m going for rather than the underlying components. Their words: “deeper”, “more 3D-like”, “more aggressive while somehow being cleaner”.

Anyway, I have not found a good way to route Parallax natively the way you describe. If they could provide an option in the Parallax Cab block to bypass the Parallax low band it would solve the issue.

My workaround is this: split the signal and duplicate the Parallax block, disable the cab on the one going to stage amp/cab. Like this:

While not optimal if you want to change settings, when you do make a change you can copy&paste from one Parallax block to the other.

 

[Scott McArron]

Had the Anagram for a few months and sold it for the QC mini mostly because I was frustrated with the screen size and lack of good modulation effects in the Anagram so I thought I’d share some random thoughts having used both if someone is on the fence.

Octave tracking is better in the Anagram. My one knock on the QC mini is some octave’s track perfectly and some don’t and I don’t understand why that is.

Cortex Cloud is amazing and really what the Anagram is missing most. Being able to pull up any capture or preset I can think of on my phone and instantly send it to the QC is incredible.

There are less stock bass amp and cab sims in the QC but they sound better and more realistic. The sims in the Anagram sounded like a slightly exaggerated version of amp/cab it was emulating.

If you’re into modulation, reverb, and time based effects the Anagram isn’t remotely close (yet) but that’s never been darkglass’s thing.

Having a 4th footswitch makes a BIG difference. I was going to have to get some kind of MIDI controller for the Anagram but with 4 foot switches and the ability to long press into 4 additional scenes/stomps, I don’t need one with the QC mini.

Making a capture with the Anagram required setting up two different sends into a DAW and uploading to a third party website. With the QC I plug a pedal in to the capture loop and press go, 3-5 minutes later, done.

Lastly, screen size. In live use, the Anagram is hard for me to read and adjust. It can be annoying even at home as blocks are easily moved around by accident. In gig mode, the mini is easily read from a distance. Darkglass needs to come up with something similar for the Anagram.

Hope this doesn’t sound like I’m ragging on the Anagram. It sounded great and I LOVED the octave options but just a few things that were overly annoying and made me want to switch.

Having experience with both, I concur on all points. Much of it DG could develop via software over time, but that 4th button is very much appreciated. Not to mention the 8 scenes per preset with instant changing makes it much more flexible if you have more than 3 changes per song.

 

[eyvindwa]

Hey! Some additional feedback info from my band is that they like Parallax more than the distortions I was able to put together with Entropia. Although that probably says more about my abilities to craft the tone I’m going for rather than the underlying components. Their words: “deeper”, “more 3D-like”, “more aggressive while somehow being cleaner”.

Anyway, I have not found a good way to route Parallax natively the way you describe. If they could provide an option in the Parallax Cab block to bypass the Parallax low band it would solve the issue.

My workaround is this: split the signal and duplicate the Parallax block, disable the cab on the one going to stage amp/cab. Like this:

View attachment 7451897

While not optimal if you want to change settings, when you do make a change you can copy&paste from one Parallax block to the other.

Hey,

I have my QC mini, and I love it, but the Parallax has so far been a bit disappointing. I cannot find a way to send a signal without cabinet emulation to my amp. Have you tried the routing you show here in a live setting? In my experience, if you disable the cabinet on the Parallax plugin, it sounds nothing at all like you would expect it to. It seems then that all you will get with that is the clean low end, and none of the "real" Parallax sound.

Is your experience different?

 

[Scott McArron]

Hey,

I have my QC mini, and I love it, but the Parallax has so far been a bit disappointing. I cannot find a way to send a signal without cabinet emulation to my amp. Have you tried the routing you show here in a live setting? In my experience, if you disable the cabinet on the Parallax plugin, it sounds nothing at all like you would expect it to. It seems then that all you will get with that is the clean low end, and none of the "real" Parallax sound.

Is your experience different?

I hear you. The Parallax was designed first to be a plugin, not a live utility to be used with a backline. And the default cab sim is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the tone.

I have not actually played it through an amp/cab rig with the cab sim turned off so I won’t be much help here. I don’t even own a cab right now as I haven’t used one in years since switching to IEMs and only sending to FOH.

If I were to play with a backline, I’d adjust how I approach my tone. Rather than dial it in and then turn the cab sim off hoping to achieve good results, I’d use a second block after a split and dial it in with the cab sim off running through the physical cab. 1 Parallax block for FOH and 1 dialed in for backline.

Maybe someone else can chime in with more direct help.

 

[nozkcb]

I had the full-size quad cortex and liked the sounds and interface, but for bass it was too much pedalboard.

I tried the nano cortex, and I could get the sounds I needed, but the lack of a display and the fact I had to use an phone or tablet to control settings on top of the two buttons on the device was too limiting.

I was leaning towards the QC mini, but as of today, they are not readily available on the used market.
A friend got me a deal on the Anagram and I reluctantly got one and for bass to try it out and so far, I'm surprisingly really very happy with it.

Given the chance I would probably swap it for a QC mini if the opportunity presented itself because I also play guitar and have captures and presets I've already built when I had the full-size quad cortex that I could repurpose.

For the time being I'm very happy with the Anagram.

I used it last night at a rehearsal with my bass rig and set up five different amps and a few compressors and ran it through the effects return into my amp/ cabinet and it sounded fantastic.

I really like the way I can turn on and off effects quickly and dive into settings much more easily than I could in the nano or than I could in my FM9 (which is an excellent unit but has a tragic user interface IMO)

Another thing I like about the Anagram is it is very small and light. Seems the older I get the weight of equipment becomes more important for some weird reason