I Gigged a Boss Katana - Now I Feel Stupid

this channel supports TruFire truefire is an online library of lessons from some of my favorite players. There are thousands of lessons there. You can use promo code jnc40 to get 40 off any of their courses. Thanks, my good friend David Beebe used to do this. I met a

boss

, Katana, and he talked on the Guitar Hour podcast about it in terms of it being a really good experience and at the time I thought bleeps, you're barking at the wrong Bush and I thought maybe he wouldn't do it. I don't know, he hadn't tried a lot of things, but I tried it earlier in the week or last week.

I had a really cool experience and the Biebs told me, "You know, if the

boss

had co-marketing him, he'd be the best-selling amp." By far I think it might actually be the best selling app anyway so foreigner thanks foreigner okay foreigner helped make this channel a reality when I was doing it before too far but anyway they helped me pay for diapers, um and one. one of the things I like to do is highlight things that I think are very interesting, three things, in fact, today there is a course by Adam Levy that is really relaxing and it's like playing with traditional Jazz changes, um.

He's actually really cool and you can kind of trade with him and, um, yeah, he's got this really cool laid-back style, so I really enjoyed that Ariel Posen has a Triad orientation video that might be helpful for some of you who are interested. in that kind of trying to play more chord tones when you're playing or over changes and then something else comes up that you can reserve, but I can't actually see it yet, Eric Johnson there's an in on improvisation with him and also a master class. I really want to check it out and see what it has to do with it.

That's all filmed in a pretty fancy studio and he goes through his gear and stuff from the looks of it, but I really want you to be able to pre-order it, I think, and get it now or it'll be released on October 1st for us people. normal. Oh yes, you can use the code jnc40 to get 40 off any course or use the code jnc 100 to get 100 off their all access pass which basically for the year you can access all of their courses and on all of them It's kind of like Netflix or something, I guess, so I hadn't experienced it this weekend. which I wanted to talk about, as you know, I play well, you might not, you probably aren't if you're new to the channel.

Hi, okay, I play guitar and make a lot of videos, some of them about amplifiers. and kind of modeling gear and the context I tried to keep in mind for some of this stuff is that I play in a dodgy wedding band on the weekends and maybe like some of you know that wedding bands That kind of thing happens in pubs where you're playing a whole mix of songs, from funk to disco rock, you know the normal kind of stuff and I try to make that like the anchor or at least part of the context of what I do.

Now that the boss sent me. a

katana

because I asked them. I'm thinking about doing a video on best practice amp in any price range and I think I could do a lot as a disclaimer. I'm a part owner of Boss uh no, but they sent this uh and it's like a 300 pound amp. Anyway, I've also made a lot of videos about Katan stuff, but you should know that that's what happened behind the scenes of this video. I asked him to lend me a Bus Katana at some point, I probably will, but I'm not getting paid for this video and we all know that the main piece of gear you and I have been looking for all these years is a Boss Katana, Why do I

feel

stupid

because I showed up with this?

I ran it in 50 watt mode, basically like this, bass, mids, treble like that on the clean channel, a hint of reverb in a matrix neolite cab and I was as happy with it as with any other gear I've played on the Latest 12 months or so and I've been chopping and changing things a little bit and not necessarily what I expected and I don't know there will probably be a lot of you watching this who are playing the

katana

, to be honest it's definitely enough so I was on 50 watt mode keeping the drummer's rhythm. I ran the master pretty loud and then set it up more or less to emulate or what ended up sounding pretty close in the studio to Jake's fender vibraverb.

Yeah, you need pedals incredibly well, so the equipment I was using there was the katana and I have a boss angry driver doing the kind of dirt that goes into a Keely workstation that has a compressor and then I have a blues breaker. that you could start for the solo or just turn up the volume for that and then there's a little bit of delay on an HX stump and then it goes to the front of the house, but yeah, I don't know, I've heard comments. from other people, so Phil, for example, tried to get the Katana from him.

I think his was in combined form. I think that could be a big part of what could make or break this as a concept. Now I wasn't impressed, of course, the other thing with this. The thing is, location and all that kind of stuff can have a big impact on whether this ends up working out for you or not, but overall I was thinking, well, that makes me

feel

a little silly because I probably shouldn't enjoy it. play a katana as much as you know a tube amp and there's a boogie, so the week before this or a couple of weeks before that I had a yogurt disaster, let's have some delicious yogurt, but I also played the mazaboogie metro Blues in the same situation. and I didn't have as much fun, frankly, I found the subway blues to be strange, the mids couldn't get the sound like I wanted, the katana sounded instantly, you know, I think it's better, clearer, it just worked, you know all that I was doing.

Halfway through the concert I changed the guitars. I'm going to make a video about that too, but overall it's super impressive. I would say if you are looking for a pedal platform, I won't recommend the katana, but rather a backup one. pedal platform type amp, the katana can easily do that, there's a lot of clean headroom, um, it's taking the pedals well in that context, uh, I'd say keep it simple, of course, you could run the whole thing on a katana instead of use the pedal platform and enter classification. like a channel changing type of Vibe where you also use the Crunch and Lead channels and to me that might be an area where you actually have a bit more tweaking and things to do, whereas I think if you just plug in your pedalboard You'd probably Well, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it performed in the studio and held up very well with the verb 64 Vibra.

It's not a studio, it's a bedroom, but you understand, the other interesting thing about this is that a couple. from days before, I just took this downstairs and it works great as a practice amp now, when I was on the phone with the boss asking him, when I said that some subscribers asked me and suggested this as one of the best practice amps it wasn't what Big enough for the internal speaker to a large extent, but since I wasn't necessarily expecting too much from it, from what they had said, I was pleasantly surprised by how useful this internal speaker could be, what that really means. that this is more than just a practice amp, more than just a gig amp, what bothers me in some ways about a lot of other practice equipment is that it doesn't really get much use outside the home, whereas this one has a power, so you could use it to power your shapers, you know, it could be used at a gig as a pedal platform, it could be a perfectly useful backup, they're cheap, it costs about or would cost if I had paid for it. which I didn't do like I said it would cost about the same as repairing a couple tube amps I don't know so here I'm plugged into nothing else and yeah you can totally practice with it um and you know it can be pretty loud if you get that kind of light it starts farting out of the speaker um or you know in terms also this is what I was playing along with Alexa downstairs okay thank you and what not I think every time I've been playing this is right, I need to go and modify it or I need to go and change this.

It's been a pretty similar experience to the boss, where you set your sound. I think it was using the stealth amps that I initially set it up as an Eric Johnson type thing, if you want to try the ones in the Gun Road folder, um, but I don't know, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of that kind of thing for the amount. amount of money you spend on it, so like I say, it's a very useful practice amp for me, it sounds as good as any other practice amp solution I've tried, you know, in terms of desktop like things and all that, it sounds pretty full and has enough volume that you can do it, then a hundred watt pedal deck is up to 100 watts, you can also turn it down to 50 which is what I was using it for and that's again very capable of touch, what else do we have?

It also has an audio interface aspect to it, you can go straight, you have your power amp so you can use it to power other pedalboards and things like that for the amount of money you spend on a katana that they have packaged. a lot of things and honestly when I was playing it live it gave me that experience of using an amp, right, I wasn't thinking straight, that sounds horrible, it sounds digital, it feels great to play, it sounds great to play, I had people come and saying that sounds good or a person maybe was trying.

I don't know anyway, so that was, um, that's the experience, it also has an effects loop, so yeah, I don't know, let me know what you think if you want. I have played the katana and I have had the opposite experience, negative experiences. I think a big part of this could be pairing it with a cab that you like and like, and I would pair it with the Matrix neolite or the Amazon Boogie with an EV Speaker on it, really nice speakers, um, I don't necessarily think the speaker combined Katana holds up as well as any of those caps.

I think that's definitely part of it, but it's a cheap solution to a lot of problems. I guess it's not sexy and so I say I feel a little silly when I have other things I could wear. You know, I could be using a Lightning mattress clone. I've been enjoying that too, but I honestly didn't feel like The Katana while playing was in any way inferior and if anything, I can get more headroom out of this than my single channel tube amp and I definitely prefer it to the mezubugi metro Blues I played about a fortnight ago, so yeah, I don't.

I know I feel silly, but that's it, yeah, let me know if you've had any negative experiences, if you've had reliability issues as well. I'd love to hear them in the comments or if it worked perfectly well for you, let me know. Well