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_theoryAnd 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.