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Katana
In a music shop, Dawson's, in Belfast last week, I came across a guitar combo amp bearing the BOSS label. It turned out to be a Katina 50. I had assumed that Katana was a brand, like Marshall or Fender. The combo looked OK but then they all do....
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. [Albert Einstein]
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U8-IVWziUE
The others don't sound even close to as decent.
The new Vox one seems quite good too...
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Amps are not in short supply in our house. So I am not in the market for an amp. I glanced at Katana threads on and off and it seems that they are well liked by the members here.
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum
If you are an experienced player, with a background of using different and pricier valve amplifiers or hand-wired boutique amps etc (I don't know if you are, I'm basically asking) would even someone at Boss say a Katana is for you?
What it does do, very well IMHO, is provide a great platform while sounding surprisingly good for the home and/or very light gigging musician while costing very little and also not weighing very much.
I'm not accusing you of this BTW, again my post is more a question, but sometimes it almost sounds like "sure the Ford Focus is a good all-round small family car, but my Porsche is a lot faster round the Nurburgring" the real question is, as an option for the home/light-gig musician on a budget of approx £200, are these good options?
I watched that one and I agree Vox clearly best, Fender rubbish. THR OK.
That's because it's easy to make an amp sound bad if you really want to.
Proper guitarists don't seem to have a problem getting a decent sound out of some of the other amps though:
That McCarty however...
Haha.. It does a bit.. Does that mean when you play one in a club you will get a bunch of Essex girls dancing around it
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I don't think any would make a bad platform for a guitarist in their target market. I could make a home for both katana and code as their approach is so different.
I'm not sure Andertons have a sinister agenda here though, as Lee said they sell hundreds of all of them except the orange.
I'd agree with this. In the video, the clean tones are at: Orange 5:00, Marshall 7:00, Katana 10:25, Fender 14:15.
The Orange just sounds small, like a computer speaker. There's a layer of crispy treble that I don't like. Credit to Chappers, he calls it "plasticy", which is a good description. Mr A didn't like that!
To my ears the Marshall is horrific. Tinny, trebly, no bottom end, or even proper mids for that matter. Disastrous.
The Katana sounds round, full, meaty, valve-like. There's something there that somehow sounds like a big valve amp being held back, instead of a small amp being forced to do something that it doesn't want to do. A great tone for any price.
The Fender is muffled and lacking in character but it's the best of the rest. Chappers prefers the clean on the Fender but that doesn't come through on the video. If it does indeed beat the Boss in real life then it's quite a bargain because it's a bit cheaper and you still get a 12" speaker.
Overall, the Orange is a total car crash - terrible tone, the least power, the smallest speaker, but the biggest price. They'll not sell many of those. To be fair to the Marshall, there's so much scope for tweakage there surely must be some decent tones hiding inside. But who can be bothered with fiddling so much? The beauty of the Boss is that it acts much more like a normal amp - select your channel and tweak it using the usual controls, rather than having to plod through loads of emulations until you find one that sounds good. It's an amp with its own sound and personality rather than trying to be all things to all men.
The Katana 50s are just about giggable, although it does start to run out of steam with a loud drummer. That's what the 100s are for, although I love the small size of the 50. I wouldn't mind trying the rest but I'd be surprised if they are as good in a live situation.
And no, I'm not paid by Boss!