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 Boss reaching for the (big) sky 
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
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Interesting. I wouldn't expect such a praise for that amp. Could you give us some details?


Yeah sure! It's a bit of a long story, so skip down to the 5th paragraph to get to the nitty gritty about the amp. So when I play live, I'm one of those guys that splits stereo into two amps. I've always felt pretty comfortable plugging into whatever bass amp was put in front of me. Usually they all sound good enough that I can tune them to sound great with the Stick, with the rare exception of the amp itself just being too hot for me to get any sort of clean and clear tone. However, I've always struggled with guitar amps.

The pickups of the Stick are tuned differently than a guitar to adjust for the tapping technique and one of the results of that is that they hit harder on the front end of amps than a guitar or bass would. This has meant that my experience has been filled with an almost constant blues-level crunch on any sort of clean tone any time I've played live with the amp set louder than a 3 or 4. It screws up all my pedals too, since any reverb or delay that hits the front end winds up coming out of the speaker with some heat on it, which muddies the whole thing up. You can ask any of my bandmates in any band I've been in; I am a bitch about the cleanliness of my sound.

So my initial solution was to try a solid state keyboard amp. It was so flat and dead, I couldn't stand it. Tyler nails it with his keyboard amp by having a couple of nice tube pre-amps on his pedal board to breath a little life into his sound. He also runs both sides into two channels of a single keyboard amp. It's a cool setup and he makes it work really well.

So my friend let me use his Hughes and Kettner Statesman pretty much whenever I had a show and he didn't (he's a really cool guy) and that was about the most headroom I'd ever been allotted with a tube amp. Even still, if I was playing somewhere larger than a small club, it would begin to break up pretty fast. So I checked out the Boss Katana series and I fell in love!

It's solid state with a tube pre-amp built in, and some really advanced modelling software as well. The combination means that I can turn the amp all the way up and it stays crystal clean but still reacts like a guitar amp. I can't believe how well I can hear the details of my playing on this thing! It's also absurdly customizable in terms of just pure tone shaping. It's got the standard 3 band EQ, as well as a presence knob, each of which have a pretty big effect on the sound. It's got 5 different amp models: acoustic, clean, crunch, lead and brown, and 4 presets that you can program in. The amp distortions are so nice that once I get the footswitch (Roland's all purpose multichannel footswitch, another $99, kind of a bummer but it works with a ton of different amps so I get it) I think I'm going to replace my Hermida Audio Mosferatu distortion pedal with the built in amp distortion.

Actually, speaking of pedals, once I get the footswitch I will most likely switch many of my pedals to my bass side rig and use the built in amp FX on my treble side. It's got 15 COSM model pedals programmed in, and if you plug it into the computer, you get access to another 55 that you can swap in and out. They sound AMAZING and are totally customizable! You can even set up whole amp presets for different bands and load them into the amp from your computer. The support software is incredibly deep and I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of it.

Here's a clip of me messing around with some of the FX out of the box. I'm on the crunch channel using the auto-wah, some reverb, and a touch of chorus. You can really hear in the auto-wah how incredibly sensitive the amp is to touch. https://www.instagram.com/p/BVyAIzqABo3/?taken-by=tap_theory

And finally, this thing was designed with gigging in mind. It's got a power attenuator that ranges from half a watt to 50 watts to 100 watts for practice, recording and gigging, and each of the settings sound identical, with a volume cap adjustment. I can set tones at the half-watt setting and know they'll sound great at full power. It's got a line out and a speaker out in the back too, so if the single 12" speaker isn't enough I can plug it directly into the board (line out) or into a bigger cab (speaker out). The line out is also good for recording. It sounds almost identical to the speaker sound with just a bit more fuzz on the gain, easy enough to adjust for. Just this past weekend, I played at a small club with it, recorded with it, and then played on a big stage at a music festival with it and it was so consistent and sounded amazing each time.

I feel like I got myself a rig that sounds like I could have easily sunk $2500+ into it, except that rig likely would have weighed 4x as much and would have been more delicate and less flexible than this thing, and all I spent was $330. $430 once I get the footswitch, but still, SO worth it.

I could go on all day, and if you've read this far, thanks. I'll probably do a video review of it at some point. I really, really love this thing, and I feel like a 7 year long frustrating search has come to a very happy ending. You'll be able to hear it all over the upcoming GEPH album as I'm definitely going to be recording with it, and if Boss or their parent Roland ever comes out with a bass amp equivalent, you better believe I'm grabbing one of those as fast as I can.

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Tue Jun 27, 2017 10:25 am
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
Thank you for that detailed response, it was very interesting!

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Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:20 pm
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
We're pretty close to knowing whether this can act in the same regards as HD500x, allowing 2 signal paths to effected independently of one another. In the video, I was not able to determine whether the inputs could be split and routed to separate outputs as he was using a single input.

I have referenced the Boss Support RV-500 page and ascertained the following...

It can be done.

There are three things to consider; Input, patch and output. A Stickist would require two of each to ensure that each side of the Stick had full separation. This unit makes it possible.

To quote, page 21 of the RV-500 manual, under the "Convenient Functions" section, under "Using two patches simultaneously". If you check the item 3 under Simul mode settings (BANK), you will note that the Output Mode (*1) can be set to Mix or in our case (said rubbing hands together and grinning broadly), set to A/B, enabling input A to route patch A through output A, with input B behaving the same.


Parameter Value Explanation
CONNECTION
Specifies how patches A and B are connected.
SERIES Patches A and B are connected in series, in the order A0B.
PARALLEL Patches A and B are connected in parallel.
OUTPUT MODE (*1)
Specifies how sound is output from the OUTPUT A/MONO and B jacks.
MIX Patches A and B are mixed and output.
A/B
Sound that is input to the INPUT A/MONO jack passes through
patch A and is output to the OUTPUT A/MONO jack.

Sound that is input to the INPUT B jack passes through patch B
and is output to the OUTPUT B jack.

* If OUTPUT (p. 18) is set

And if your next question was, can the new MD-500 Modulation unit do the same?

Yes. Yes it can.

(deep breath)

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Wed Jun 28, 2017 6:13 pm
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
I think... you can set the output mode to mix the A and B signal which would mean that... if you have it in the end of your pedalboard it will mix the signals for you and a mixer is not needed.

I think this is the case... but wouldn't know for sure until tested...
I guess this is what return policies are for... :lol:

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Thu Jun 29, 2017 8:43 am
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
That is true. If you had the reverb unit as the last pedal in your board, and you were running your bass and melody signal paths in mono, you could use the pedal to join them and run both signal paths in mono into a single amp OR run each side out mono to separate amps.

In each case, the pedal would support it's own patch for each signal path. We loved this about the Boss ME-50 and ME-70. This is a great single pedal solution for Stickist. Running separate signal paths out of a single unit is a game changer , although, Strymon still gets high marks for making a durable pedal with a wide variety of sounds AND using superior quality chipsets.

I think I would have to have both to determine which is "better". I'm quite fond of my Big Sky, so it's a tough sell AND Strymon are my home town hero in the pedal world, based right here in LA.

Thanks so much for posting this Boaz - a great thread!

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Thu Jun 29, 2017 10:37 am
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
earthgene wrote:
That is true. If you had the reverb unit as the last pedal in your board, and you were running your bass and melody signal paths in mono, you could use the pedal to join them and run both signal paths in mono into a single amp OR run each side out mono to separate amps.

In each case, the pedal would support it's own patch for each signal path. We loved this about the Boss ME-50 and ME-70. This is a great single pedal solution for Stickist. Running separate signal paths out of a single unit is a game changer , although, Strymon still gets high marks for making a durable pedal with a wide variety of sounds AND using superior quality chipsets.

I think I would have to have both to determine which is "better". I'm quite fond of my Big Sky, so it's a tough sell AND Strymon are my home town hero in the pedal world, based right here in LA.

Thanks so much for posting this Boaz - a great thread!


I've been watching the demo videos on these pedals, and they look pretty promising for a Stickist looking to expand their effects palette.

However, these do seem to fall a bit short of the comparable Strymons in overall variety of sounds. For instance, the modulation version MD-500, it's missing many of the interesting things that the Mobius can do with the Destroyer, Quadrature, and Formant modules.

If I were going to grab a big boy multieffect delay, reverb, or modulation, the Strymons would probably still be the more premium choice. But they also carry a much more premium price, even on the used market.

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Wed Jul 05, 2017 10:28 pm
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
Apologies for the necro, the Boss Katana amps do not have tube preamps.


Mon Apr 23, 2018 1:41 pm
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Post Re: Boss reaching for the (big) sky
I have the Strymon Big Sky, TimeLine and Mobius. I'm happy with them. 8-)

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