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Time-stamp: <2023-10-27 21:22>
My girlfriend just bought a place, it's a couple hundred miles away from where I live, and I'll be spending enough time there to warrant a proper guitar rig for practicing. My current rig is a) expensive and b) stationary, as I'm a bedroom player only at this time. I was searching for something that sounds good enough for a good price. I took a chance, and what I found blew me away.
If the pandemic had one upside, it was to inspire me to pick up an instrument again. If you are at a point where you are thinking about it as well, some of my thoughts might be interesting to you. If you just want to know what I think about the Katana, feel free to skip the rest. This is going to be long.
Music always played a big role in my life. Songs make me cry, give me energy, are the lube to properly wallow in sorrow, or provide hours of joy -- sometimes all of it at the same time (looking at you, Steven Wilson!). When I was 13 years old, the movie »John Carpenter's Christine«, an adaption of a Stephen King novel, entered the cinemas. I was endlessly fascinated by this movie, to an extent that I bought a 1957 Dodge much later in life, and I still have the movie poster on my wall. This movie has a scene in which Christine spontaneously repairs itself, to the tune »Harlem Nocturne« in a version by The Viscounts. It features a saxophone solo by Harry Haller that to this day is the coolest sax part I've ever heard. It made me want to play the saxophone.
Now, this was the mid 1980s, and I was living in a small town, which had one sole music shop. My mom and I went there, and they sold us a Keilwerth Student tenor sax (»German quality product!«, they said. Made in a Czechoslovakian sweat shop, it turns out.) for 1500 Deutschmark. I worked at a gas station after school for half a year to pay for this saxophone.
The owner of the music shop also gave lessons. In the first lesson he told me how stupid I was to start with a saxophone, when everyone knew you had to start woodwinds with the clarinet. He also taught me a clarinet embouchure, which is bullshit for the saxophone, but how should I have known?
I grew up with a narcissistic father, one of whose traits was to be overly critical to anything and anyone but himself. This gave me performance anxiety, which I suffer from to this day. (I can't tell you whether I'll ever be able to play in front of a crowd. I might make a mistake.) Add to this a teacher who turned out to be a huge asshole, a few things I could not seem to get to work with this instrument, and after half a year I gave up playing. I kept the Keilwerth, though. I'd paid so much for it.
20 years later, while my marriage was falling apart, I took the Keilwerth out of its hiding place and brought it to a woodwind technician. Got it back a week later, when he told me: »This thing was leaky all over the place, it's a wonder it played at all. I fixed the leaks, but to be honest, it sounds like crap, and it won't get any better.« In a way, this was a huge relief. If this instrument truly sucked, maybe I wasn't completely void of talent.
At the time, I was living in a bedsit with my wife, and as you cannot mute a sax, I could not play at home. But I was working as a sysadmin, and the server room deep in the bowels of the building was soundproof enough, so I put the sax and the sheet music stand there and played Harlem Nocturne (the original version as per my sheets) every night until I had it down. I was thinking of getting a good sax, armed with lots of information thanks to saxontheweb.com. That's when I met my second wife who got pregnant rather quickly, which made me focus on her and my daughter. The sax went back on the shelf, where it still sits. I won't sell it, I don't want anyone to suffer from it when Taiwan makes perfectly good saxophones for a fraction of the price I paid for mine back in the day. This is what a newbie should start with.
When my kid started school, I thought of learning an instrument again. One that doesn't have to play at 11 at all times. The music I mainly listen to is guitar-based, so this is where I went this time. Got a cheap used Squier Affinity Strat set, went online and tried to figure out how to play it. Then my wife and I went poly, I met my girlfriend (see above), and the guitar got put in a corner for 7 years. That's when the pandemic hit. My daugher, now 12, wanted to play an acoustic guitar. I found a used one, and the guy had a cheap electric to sell for 30 bucks as well. I took it. It had a couple of issues I had to fix, but I like to fix stuff. And when I started playing it, I realized that the Squier was simply too narrow for my big hands. I made progress much more quickly this time. And I stuck with it, been playing almost every day for three years now.
Sadly, being in my 50s, I can see how much more quickly my kid learns to play guitar than I do. She practices not half as much as I do, and I can see that if she put more effort in it she'd be out of sight in no time. Luckily, being in my 50s, I have the patience to wait it out, and the money to get better gear. Read on, there's a lesson in here.
So, the Squier Affinity came with a really bad Fender-branded amp. Now I had a mediocre Squier for small hands, a crappy but playable Rocktile, and a bad amplifier. It just did not sound any good. And a couple of Behringer pedals didn't really help. So, spending hours and hours on Youtube watching gear reviews, I bought a Vox MV50 Hi Gain, a very small »NuTube« amp, and attached it to a HiFi speaker I had lying around. That didn't sound too well either. I needed a proper guitar cab, and I found a home-built one with Celestion G12M-70 (many seem to dislike this one, but Kurt Cobain used it in Nirvana, and I think it qualifies as »underrated«). Now, that started to sound actually good. Then I bought the first guitar I'd call decent: a Squier Contemporary Telecaster that I eventually upgraded with a Seymour Duncan Phat Cat in the neck and a splittable Seymour Duncan Little '59 in the bridge position. Tone!
At some point I started fiddling with pedals. I like all kinds of music, and I learned tracks from very different genres. Jazz, rock, metal, blues at the time. Problem was, the Hi Gain doesn't like certain pedals in front of the amp, and it does not have an effects loop. There was a video on Youtube showing how to add an FX loop to the MV50. I got the parts, drilled the holes, the drill bit caught and wrecked the PCB. Now I had no amp.
I got a used Orange Micro Dark, a small tube preamp/solid state power amp head. It has an FX loop. That sounded good enough for a while, but it's mostly made for crunch sounds and has sonic limitations. So, I went ahead and shelled out real money for an all tube Engl Fireball 25. This amp has it all: great cleans with lots of headroom, crushing metal distortion, and everything inbetween, plus a built-in noise gate and attenuator to play at the-kid-is-asleep levels. This is my main amp now, and I love it. It is also heavy, and it set me back 1000 Euros with the two footswitches it wants.
My Engl Fireball 25 and custom build cabinet
Youtube made me believe that one needs different overdrives and distortions. I found that with the Engl, I don't need any of this except for a fuzz. The preamp section of this amp is glorious.
Yet the Engl has no built-in effects. Black Hole Sun needs a Univibe, lots of old rock wants a tremolo, U2's Pride wants a delay with a dotted 8, surf rock, which I love to play, demands a spring reverb. My SG wants to be treble-boosted. So this happened:
Both the Terraform and the Trio+ are stereo capable (all the Source Audio stuff is as well, but I'm not making use of it at present). I'm using this to have stereo with my second amp. When the Trio+ is engaged, it outputs bass and drum to the second, clean amp. Otherwise the drums would distort when playing crunch guitar.
As I found both cheaply used, I got another MV50, this time the Clean version which takes pedals in front of the amp just fine, plus the Vox 8 inch speaker, which sounds so much better than what Orange sells for the Micro Dark.
So, this is my rig, and I play it with one of these guitars:
What have I learned from buying all this? First of all, there is a host of pedals I haven't mentioned that are sitting in drawers: a couple of Big Muffs, preamps, a noise gate, a Digitech SDRUM. I'll probably sell most of them at some point. Youtube reviews are a blessing and a curse. The most important lesson is this: You'll probably start out with a cheap kit, as most beginners do. Don't go for the lowest priced ones. Rather find a used one one level up base tier. The cheapest offerings will frustrate you.
Then, when you realize you love playing guitar and want to keep doing it, skip one level again, and go buy decent gear. If you can't afford it right now, save. My Squier Contemporary is not a bad guitar, but the original pickups are not that good. The Seymour Duncans were pretty much the price of the whole guitar, plus the time I had to spend wiring them in. In the end, I should have gone for a Yamaha Revstar or Fender Mexico instead. The EOB Strat is on another level, and the Gibson SG is even better. I could live well with owning only this one guitar. Plus, it has a Samantha Fish autograph hidden on the inside of the electronics lid. :)
There's one more guitar I didn't mention, which is a Harley Benton DC-DLX Gotoh. My first SG-type guitar. I can recommend this one to a beginner, its only shortcomings are the weight and the microphonic pickups (which sound great otherwise). I gave this one to my kid when I took the leap to buy a real SG.
Now onto why I wrote all this up. Last week Fender presented the Tonemaster Pro with a lot of Youtube fanfare. It seems to be an awesome modeler with a great UI. It is also 1800 Euros plus the cab, which is another 600. This got me thinking whether I should take another look at BOSS amps, which come with a lot of effects included and are lauded by many, as a budget alternative. BOSS just introduced the Katana 50 MkII EX, which has new bells and whistles, and, together with the foot switch one would want to have along with it, is priced around 500 Euros. I did not want to shell out that much money again. The EX is not on the used market yet. The MkII is, but it lacks features compared to the EX, and is only marginally cheaper. Should I go with a Katana 100 instead, which has all the features, but is heavier and overpowered for my needs? An Artist model even? Or a head plus cabinet? Choices, too many choices.
When I learned that there is an app called »Katana Librarian« out there that pretty much makes a MkI a MkII without effects loop, I decided to see if I could snatch up a Katana 50 MkI for cheap. And I found one for 100 Euros in my neighborhood. It looks brand-new, it came with the original cardboard and a cover, and the previous owner clearly had never attached it to a computer; it was still on the original firmware. I updated that, connected to Katana Librarian (which costs some 10 Euros and is worth every Cent), and was stunned. My rig as detailed above sounds perfect to me. The Katana with the community-supplied patches one can find on (ew) Facebook is, with one download and the click of a button, 80 to 90 percent (depending on desired tone) where my rig is. I dare say that in a live setting you would not hear a difference unless everything is perfectly mixed and the venue has superb acoustics (and it never has), and I can imagine that the added tonal warmth my Engl provides could be detrimental in a band in direct comparison. Let alone the weight, and I'd have to build a portable pedal board.
This thing is 1/30 of what my rig set me back. I had to fiddle half an eternity to get my rig to sound the way it does, and it took a small fraction of that time with the Katana.
Bottom line is, don't be marketed into buying the latest and greatest just because it adds the odd knob. The Katana MkI is dirt cheap because the MkII is out there, and it still rocks your socks off. In most cases you will probably not miss the FX loop. It has 65 effects built in! And it takes most pedals well in front of the amp.
If you're a beginner, and even if you're not: for under 200 Euros I got an amazing amp combo, an app to control it, and an Airstep footswitch for added speed and comfort. This is really hard to beat.
With the initial enthusiasm fading, I'll dial the tone enthusiasm back to 80-ish percent of a really great tube amp/pedal rig on average. With a lot of fiddling in the app it might get even better, but I maintain that for practicing and even most live situations it is well good enough and pareto-efficient. I've since received the XSonic Airstep KAT edition, which is a switcher pedal that allows to foot-control the installed patches and their effects, plus it can connect to Katana Librarian via Bluetooth and thus enable a wireless connection to the amp. I highly recommend this pedal.
I downloaded a host of patches for everything from surf rock to metal, and most of them need none or only minor tweaks to sound great. While it won't replace my main rig, the Katana is a keeper.
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✍ Wolfgang Mederle CC BY-SA 4.0
✉ <madearl+gemini@mailbox.org>
language: en
date: 2023-10-08 13:01
tags: guitar, tone, pedals, rig, tubes, DSP
