Musician's multitool destroys your excuses for not practicing guitar

As a once-starry-eyed musician nearing the age of 40, I totally fell for the promo video for this gadget, which describes how there's a lot of friction in simply getting down to practice or play guitar. The Neko promises to get you rockin' out without having to set stuff up, or waking the neighbors – and it fits in your pocket.

If the fledgling company behind the Neko can actually pull this off, its product will be the stuff of guitarists' dreams. This musician's multitool promises everything you could need to practice lessons or your daily routine, record ideas, and even perform live.

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

And by play, I mean kick out the jams. You can shape your sound using any of 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 full rigs to dial in the tone you have in mind. And rather than searching through endless lists, you can simply speak and describe your dream tone, and its AI-powered system will find a tone for you.

Once you've got your sound locked in, you can simply play and hear yourself through headphones connected via a 3.5-mm input (including high-impedance cans that need to be powered), or you can jam along to tracks streamed from your phone. The device uses Lalal.ai's service to separate stems from any song, so you can mute the guitar and play on top of the track.

Now here's where things get crazy. The Neko also features a multitrack digital audio workstation, so you can record yourself playing, add multiple layers, and save and share your ideas via USB-C or through the companion mobile app.

If you're okay using generative AI, you can record a riff or a lick, pick a genre or vibe on the Neko's 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen, and have the device whip up a whole track based on your idea in that chosen style. It may not be exactly what gets you famous, but it could well help you beat writer's block, or hear a possible direction for a composition you've been messing with.

There's more: this gizmo has 16 GB of onboard storage to record stuff you play into it. It'll analyze your sessions and organize them so you can look up all your ideas by date and find individual pieces of music in all your noodling.

That's totally nuts. It sounds like the Recall feature Microsoft wanted to build into Windows, where the OS would take snapshots of whatever you were doing on your PC and let you search through your activity.

These features sure could remove the hesitation and setup involved in getting started playing more often, and quickly capture musical ideas before they vanish from your own memory (oh, the riffs I'd blow you away with – if I could only remember what they sounded like).

The folks behind Neko say this even works 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 on here, like converting audio to MIDI and transcribing your playing 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 needs to not only run NAM at an extremely low latency of 3 ms, but also continually record your playing, on a platform that supports AI-powered services. That means you need an NPU chip to handle the AI workload, and find room for that alongside the Neko's own battery and the components that charge and receive signals from the two wireless jacks.

I'm not saying it's not possible, but this is a whole lot for any team to pull off – let alone a new company creating its first product. We've seen effects pedals that support NAM to grant access to limitless tones, and even a compact amp that can do this – but the recording and practice features, as well as the built-in wireless jacks, could take the Neko to a whole other level entirely.

If it can stick the landing, this is going to become a must-have for guitarists at various skill levels. That includes casual players and professional musicians with great gear, 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 US$399 (down from its expected MSRP of $599), and a goal to ship initial orders in April 2027. As much as I'm skeptical, I would love to see this come to life, and to a store shelf near me.

Get a closer look at the Neko on the company's site, where you can sign up to receive a discount on the upcoming Kickstarter campaign reward.

Source: Neko