The musician’s multi-tool puts an end to your excuses for not practicing guitar

As a once-starring musician approaching 40, I totally fell in love with the promotional video for this device, which describes how there is a lot of friction just getting into practicing or playing the guitar. The Neko promises to make you rock without having to set things up or wake up the neighbors, and it fits in your pocket.

If the fledgling company behind the Neko can really pull it off, their product will be a guitarist’s dream. This musician’s multi-tool promises everything you could need to practice lessons or your daily routine, record ideas, and even perform live.

First, the Neko has two wireless inputs with 1/4-inch connectors that magnetically connect to the device and charge when docked. Grab one, plug it into your guitar, and you’re ready to play.

And by game I mean clearing traffic jams. You can shape your sound using any of the hundreds of thousands of community-created Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) patches from the Tone3000 platform. Neko supports up to three blocks, so you can stack amps, cabinets, pedals, and even entire rigs to achieve the tone you have in mind. And instead of searching through endless lists, you can simply speak up and describe your dream shade, and its AI-powered system will find a shade for you.

Once you’ve locked in your sound, it can simply be played and listened to through headphones connected via a 3.5mm input (including high impedance cans that need to be powered), or you can play tracks streamed from your phone. The device uses Lalal.ai’s service to separate the roots of any song, so you can mute the guitar and play over the track.

Now this is where things get crazy. Neko also features a multi-track digital audio workstation, so you can record yourself playing, add multiple layers, and save and share your ideas via USB-C or via the companion mobile app.

If you’re okay with using generative AI, you can record a riff or lick, choose a genre or vibe on the Neko’s 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen, and have the device create an entire track based on your idea in that chosen style. It may not be exactly what you’re famous for, but it could very well help you overcome writer’s block or hear a possible direction for a composition you’ve been playing with.

There’s more: this device has 16 GB of built-in storage to record what you play. It will analyze your sessions and organize them so you can search all your ideas by date and find individual pieces of music in all your noodles.

That’s crazy. It looks like the recovery feature that Microsoft wanted to integrate into Windows, where the operating system would take snapshots of whatever you were doing on your PC and allow you to search your activity.

These features could surely eliminate the guesswork and setup involved in starting to play more frequently and quickly capture musical ideas before they fade from your own memory (oh, the riffs I’d blow you away with, if only I could remember what they sounded like).

The people behind Neko say this works even for live performances; You can set it up with a wireless foot controller and switch between tones, and even use the device in your effects loop.

There are even more features here, like converting audio to MIDI and transcribing your performance into tablature. Neko Engineering even has numerous clips of the device in action. But honestly, it all sounds too good to be true.

The hardware must not only run NAM with an extremely low latency of 3 ms, but also continuously record its playback, on a platform that supports AI-powered services. That means you need an NPU chip to handle the AI ​​workload and find room for it alongside the Neko’s own battery and the components that charge and receive signals from the two wireless connectors.

I’m not saying it’s not possible, but this is a lot for any team, let alone a startup creating its first product. We’ve seen effects pedals that support NAM to grant access to unlimited tones, and even a compact amp that can do this, but the recording and practice features, as well as the built-in wireless connectors, could take the Neko to a whole different level.

If it can hold the landing, it will become an essential tool for guitarists of different levels. That includes casual musicians and professional musicians with great equipment, because this can support spontaneous songwriting sessions on the road.

The company intends to crowdfund the Neko later this month, with a discounted price of $399 (below its expected MSRP of $599) and aiming to ship initial orders in April 2027. As much as I’m skeptical, I’d love to see this come to life and on the shelf of a store near you.

Take a closer look at Neko on the company’s site, where you can sign up to receive a discount on the next Kickstarter campaign reward.

Source: Neko