Francisco Cresp and Doug Castro, the co-founders of Neural DSP, have finally opened up on the controversial Nano Cortex teaser videos the company launched in September, which perplexed the guitar community.
The promotional videos were written, produced, and directed by British music producer George Lever and composer and producer James Sanger, and also featured a cameo by Neural DSP artist Rabea Massaad – and can best be described as comedic in nature.
They revolve around a producer tasked with making music for a marketing campaign. He receives a briefcase with the Quad Cortex but soon realizes that what he was supposed to receive should have been much smaller in size. Lo and behold, he embarks on a journey to track down this mini unit, i.e., the Nano Cortex.
Commenting on the nature of the lengthy videos, Castro tells Guitar.com, “Companies – even big companies – reflect the traits of the people that make them.
“We take our work very seriously in terms of how good the products have to be. Our quality standards are very high. But at the same time, us as individuals, we love to have fun, and do goofy, silly things sometimes. Why would you work 60, 70 hours a week if you’re not having fun?”
He continues, “I think that we’re a pretty quirky company – if you look at our marketing before this video campaign we’re already doing some tongue-in-cheek things.”
“We wanted to take a chance and see what happened. It was a very intense project – we saw the videos a few days in advance, and we thought they were quite fun and funny. We weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, people are gonna hate this.’”
The videos did indeed receive a lot of unforeseen backlash. “We were not expecting that amount of hatred and negative comments,” Cresp admits.
“But it taught us a lot of lessons about when to take the risk, how to take the risk, and to discuss it further before, maybe plan it differently.”
On the flipside, Castro points out that the teasers did manage to do one thing: get people talking. “It was probably the most talked about release this year, right?” he asserts.
“The worst thing you can hear when you release something you’ve invested all your time and money in is silence.”
The Nano Cortex was ultimately launched on September 18 as an all-in-one, tiny-yet-powerful amp modeler, IR loader, effects processor, and Capture device that very much serves as the Quad Cortex’s smaller sibling.
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