Amp settings on a Katana 50

I have a Boss Katana-50 amp, and try as I might, I can’t seem to replicate the same tonality Justin uses in the BLIM videos. Anyone with the same amp have any suggestions (Clean/Crunch/Lead/Brown . . . Gain . . . Reverb)?

Hoi Clay ,
I hope this video helps, I just put it on start at the blues part, but with so many settings it might be a good idea to watch it completely… maybe someone will come up with a ready-fixed answer, I know figuring it out yourself is an art with most amplifiers and skills in itself… :grimacing: since your own skills and your guitar and more are also involved too so sometimes …kuch… :blush: difficult to sound like Justin… but I understand that with these models everything has been programmed and much easier to come close sometimes… I sometimes dream about it :scream:…first I need to learn my ableton after ( 3? years)… :see_no_evil_monkey:

Welcome here and i hope this video helps …I wish you alot of fun
:smiling_face_with_sunglasses:
Greetings,Rogier

I can’t help with what tones your after and I don’t have your amp.

Myself, I find it hard to find someone else’s tone.
So.
I set my amp to where it sound good to me. Where it’s ā€˜my’ tone.

fwiw, I don’t have a modeler amp. Just amps with plain controls.
Volume, bass, mid, treble, reverb.
It seems I’m always able to find a tone that works for whatever song I’m doing with these simple controls. On amps that sound good to start with. My disclaimer is, is that I have had a amp that I couldn’t get any good tones out of not matter how I adjusted it. My cure for that was to get rid of that amp.

imho, keep it as simple as possible (ie less effects the better, generally, barring reverb and tremolo) for good tone. Vol. and pre volume if ya have it control may be the most import one of all.
Also, don’t forget ya got vol. and tone controls on your guitar. I use these often too.

Also, consider your playing dynamics. Play it hard, play it soft. Play it right next to the bridge or play it up by the neck. Play it with a pick, play it with your fingers. All will effect your tone.

And the biggest part is to have fun with whatever tones ya got going! It’s alright to sound like you. :wink:

Good luck in your tone search. It’s never ending I think.

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ā€œToneā€ depends on a lot of things: guitar pickups, type of guitar, amp settings, the space you are playing in, your pick material and picking techniques and, in some cases, how you fret the notes.

Some of these are going to be out of your control.

For instance, if you have a single-coil, solid-body strat style guitar and are trying to match Justin playing a humbucker equipped semi-hollow Gibson 335 then you are going to be miles off from the start.

Equally, if you have a humbucker equipped SG and are trying to sound like John Mayer, that’s not going to be easy.

As for amp settings, consider that Justin tends to use a very expensive Kemper profiling amp with carefully selected presets that emulate some very high-priced, high-end, boutique amps.

Now the good news is, in the Katana you have a very versatile amp and you probably can make a strat sound a bit like a 335: there’s actually built-in effects for stuff like that, but it’s not available on the top panel controls. You will need to get down and dirty with Boss Tone Studio for that.

And that’s not trivial. There’s endless tweaking available to you, and you’ll also need a good ear and a lot of practice and study to judge what needs tweaking, and to know what to tweak.

Can you sound exactly like Justin and his setup. Probably not. But it certainly is possible to get relatively close. But I would question if it’s good use of your time.

Of course, it’s often said ā€œtone is in the fingersā€ and there’s some truth to that. When I first started playing I could never get a tone I liked from my first practice amp (a Roland Cube) but, once I got better technique, I learned how to play to get the sort of tones I wanted.

Also, as others have suggested, it’s probably best to not obsess to much over matching tone, especially on artists records. Usually, the tone they got in the recording studio when playing is not the same as you hear on the record.

Obviously, that doesn’t apply so much for one of Justin’s videos, but the principle of not trying to exactly match tones applies.

@HappyCat gives good advice. Learn how to use your amp and get tones you like from it, and the Katana has lots of decent tones available even just from the top panel controls.

Cheers,

Keith

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A better approach would be to get the best tone that you can from your rig. Most people dime the tone and volume knobs on their guitar which rarely sounds optimal. Likewise most folks then set their amp knobs to 12 o’clock. Dialing in a decent tone is a huge part of learning the instrument. If you don’t sound good you are less likely to advance. It boils down to time on task, using your ears and getting to know your gear.

Consider downloading some presets and then tweaking them to your liking.

EDIT: Most of the time dialing back the guitar’s tone and volume to 3/4 with a clean amp and some slapback delay and/or reverb will go a long way toward a decent/fatter tone.

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As @HappyCat and others say, it’s probably a more worthwhile pursuit to find a tone that you like from your amp than to try and emulate others. I think it’s satisfying to get your own sound. I don’t think that we need to sound exactly like Mark Knopfler or Carlos Santana or whoever our guitar heroes are.

I like things simple and took that approach with my simple analogue Orange 35RT like @happycat does and found some nice tones and then played around with the guitar controls and modifying my picking as @Majik suggests. I have a very small amount of reverb and a very gentle use of overdrive from a Bluesdriver pedal and that’s enough to get a nice sound. As @CT said, I mostly have the tone dialled back a bit as it’s a tele (can be quite a biting treble) and the volume as well back 3/4 from full. If I want a bit more breakup I just then turn up the volume on the guitar and the pickups add a bit more of that. However it’s also about your taste in music. I like punk and rock, yet when I play guitar I actually prefer a relatively clean sound.

Have fun with your gear.

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@Socio I am little sneak peak here… have nothing to help here, but I got almost 2 years at home Boss Katana MK2 50 and barely played with electric. The video you shared looks really great and it makes me wanna turn on that combo again. If I dont count I am acoustic player… biggest problem for me in electric guitar playing is finding sound that I like or the sound like someone in the video. :smiley:

Thanks for sharing that.