The signal chain
Eight fixed blocks, what goes where, and where mono becomes stereo.
Nothing reorders. Modulation, delay and reverb are each locked to one specific slot, and there’s only ever one capture.
The order is fixed
Input Gate, two pre-effect slots, the Neural Capture, the IR Loader, then three post-effect slots. That order never changes, and there is no effects loop.
The slot rules are stricter than people expect, and running into them feels like a bug when it isn’t. Select a block below to see exactly what can load there.
- Guitar in
- 1L / 2R
Mono until the IR Loader, stereo after it. Nothing in this chain can be reordered.
Neural Capture
Your amp. One capture at a time — this is the hard limit.
There are no amp models here, only captures. And only one can be active per preset, so you cannot stack a captured drive pedal into a captured amp. That single restriction is the most-cited architectural complaint about the device, and it's what reviewers pointed at when withholding a perfect score.
Nano Cortex FAQ · Guitar.com review · Guitar.com, NanOS 2.0This slot holds a Neural Capture, chosen by turning Footswitch I. There is no list of devices because there are no amp models — only captures.
The rules worth memorising
Five constraints account for nearly every “why can’t I…” question:
- Modulation only in Post-FX 1. Delay only in Post-FX 2. Reverb only in Post-FX 3. You cannot put chorus after delay, or run two delays.
- Drives, wahs, filters and mono compressors are pre-slot only. Transpose is legal only in Pre-FX 1.
- EQ is the one category legal in any slot, pre or post. That flexibility turns out to be genuinely useful.
- One capture per preset — you cannot stack a captured pedal into a captured amp. Use the built-in overdrives in a pre slot instead.
- Mono in, stereo out. Stereo begins at the IR Loader, which is why the stereo (ST) effect variants only exist in the post slots.
The useful consequence nobody mentions
If a capture already contains a mic’d cabinet, you can’t turn on the IR Loader to get low- and high-cut without stacking a second speaker on top of it.
The fix is to put a Low-High Cut EQ in a post slot instead. The forum tested capturing a deliberately flat IR for this purpose and concluded the EQ block is simpler and better. This is the single most useful thing the fixed chain lets you do.
Why old tutorials get this wrong
Before NanOS 2.0.0 in April 2025, these slots were hard-wired to specific devices with no choice at all — the chain was literally Adaptive Gate, Transpose, capture, IR, a DC-2W chorus, an analog delay and Mind Hall reverb.
Any tutorial recorded before that date describes a different pedal, and a lot of the most-viewed Nano Cortex videos are from launch. If a video doesn’t mention loading devices into slots, it predates the feature.