Guitar Gear

Being a digital amp, like other digital devices, you can tweak the Katana to get the sounds tailored to your specifications. It’s super-easy to do with the simple and straight-forward user interface as shown below (this is a screenshot from my setup):

Making adjustments here is a great way to set up your sounds before you play a gig. For me, I wanted to set up Channels 1 and 2 for my next gig. Channel 1 would be my clean tone, while Channel 2 would be my dirty tone. I could’ve easily done this from the amp, but it’s a lot quicker to access all the functions from the UI.

For my clean tone, I wanted some Chorus. As you can see above, with the UI, you can tweak a lot of parameters to tailor the effect’s sound to your liking. To be honest, I’m only showing you the screen. I didn’t touch a single thing on it.

And herein lies my dilemma with any modeling amp: There’s so much I can tweak that it’s VERY EASY to screw things up, and thus very easy to get overwhelmed and frustrated with all the different settings. My advice? Set mix levels with the effects and forget just use the defaults.

I say that a bit tongue in cheek. But to be honest, having this level of control is both a godsend and a curse. It’s a godsend in that if you know what you’re doing and you have a good idea what the response should be should you change a parameter, then it’s awesome to have this amount of control. But if you’re just experimenting and you’re not documenting your changes (like most of us), you could screw things up right quick. What you’ll find yourself doing if you mess up is a factory reset; maybe several.

Back at the turn of the century, I used to have a Line 6 Flextone II. It was a great amp. I could tweak the shit out of it. And I did. I spent hours and hours making adjustments to get just the right sounds out of the amp. Doing that was both tedious and laborious and earned me the ire of my wife for tweaking my amp instead of doing household chores. 🙂 I got so frustrated with that amp that I finally sold it and got a Roland Cube 60 that I played for years until I started getting into valve amps.

The primary reason for me selling the Flextone II was that there was just too much to tweak. Back then, I was gigging between 150 to 200 gigs a year, and I really just needed something I could get set up quickly and go. But also, in looking back to that time, I hadn’t yet found my own sound, so I was experimenting quite a bit. But the practical side of me won out because frankly, I just needed something that sounded good enough to get me through a gig.

The one thing that the Flextone II did give me was a sense of the sounds I would like in my tone both clean and dirty. For my clean tone, I always want a little chorus, little reverb, and be able to layer on a bit of delay. For my dirty tone, I want some reverb – not much, mind you – and I prefer soft clipping distortion over square wave tones for my dirty sound. The Flextone II helped me discover that. On the other hand, not only could I add effects with the Flextone II, but I could also adjust amp settings. My head was spinning from all the shit I had to consider.

Now I’ve come full circle with the Katana. Yes, I know BOSS likes to claim that it’s not a modeling amp. It is a modeling amp. But instead of being able to tweak the amp models themselves, they provide five models and let you tweak the effects. And it’s set up so that each model from “acoustic” to “brown” has more gain than the next. It’s a no-brainer.

For me, though there are four preset channels, I only use two of them; one for clean, one for dirty. As I mentioned above, I don’t tweak the effect defaults. My main concern is getting the effects I want, then set the channel volume level with my guitar volume set to the middle. I do this for both clean and dirty so that both channels are at unity volume when my guitar’s set in the middle. That’s it. To me at least, the default effect sounds are just fine.

So sure, you can tweak the Katana all you want. But at least for me, I’m too busy to be mucking about with amp settings. I’ll let those who want to invest the time and have the patience to tweak do the tweaking.