There’s no shortage of gear for guitar players these days. Most will have their fair share of amps, effects, tuners, computer interfaces, recorders, software, and more, which they will have to set up any time they want to practice. The Neko looks to simplify your practice gear by shrinking it all into a pocket-sized device.
Billed as a “pocket wireless guitar studio,” the device streamlines your practice setup by bundling together a bunch of tools in a single rig. Even better, it does it all wirelessly, allowing you to get your guitar practice without having to deal with a mess of cables.
The Neko is a small device about the size of a thick iPod from back in the day. There’s a 3.5-inch full-color touchscreen (800 x 480 pixels) out front, along with a scroll wheel, four large square buttons, and a couple of smaller buttons. It comes with two jacks: one that you plug into your guitar and one that you plug into an amp. Both connect wirelessly to the device, so everything is transmitted with no cables. If you want to listen to your playing via headphones, then you skip the amp part, as the device comes with both Lo-Z and Hi-Z headphones output. Both jacks, by the way, slot conveniently in the back of the device, so you can keep them snug in their own compartment when not in use.
When the plugs are connected, the device handles all the signal processing, similar to what specialized software will do when your plug your guitar into a computer. The device comes preinstalled with numerous amp, cab, and pedal tones, with access to innumerable NAM patches from the Tone3000 platform if you connect to the internet via Wi-Fi. It supports stacking up to three blocks, too, so you can combine multiple rigs to dial in whatever tone you want. If scrolling through endless lists of patches sounds like an ordeal, you can use the voice search function, so you simply tell it what tone you’re looking for and it will use the onboard AI to find it for you.
The Neko comes with a multi-track DAW for recording and layering functions, with 16GB of onboard storage for saving your files. And yes, you can play those back at any time, either through headphones or the built-in speaker. It can also translate any audio into guitar and bass tabs using the onboard AI, allowing you to convert any song into tablatures you can follow on the built-in screen. If you record a riff, you can also use the AI to generate an entire track based on it, which is pretty wild for a device this small. Other features include time machine that supports both local and online storage (they give you 2GB cloud storage free), built-in tuner, built-in metronome, and a MIDI backing track arranger. If you’re willing to pay a subscription, you can also get access tone creation AI, 10-stem separation, a high-quality backing track arranger, AI-generated tabs for all instruments (not just guitar and bass), and more.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Neko. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $549.
