The 100 has an fx loop I believe which is handy for things like loopers
I ended up going with a fender gtx-100 because (a) it came with a foot switch) and (b) has a built in looper and tuner etc.
The new mk3 katana still doesnt have that afik but the new amp/edge of breakup one sounds good
Hi Rob, may I ask you, if you had the chance to compare them both? Lots of good reviews on the Katana, and gen 3 might even be better than the previous, but Iâm really interested in the gtx-100 too. My current amp doesnât have a loop function and no input for pedals. So might probably upgrade at a point.
I have no info at all for you for amps in Oz Bret.
But I do have a fwiw comment.
The kanta is âalwaysâ the recommend amp. It has all the features.
And I will say it sounds ok to me too in the you tube video reviews of it that Iâve watched. If you want infinite tone changing capabilities (modeler/computer amp) w/many connection (to your computer) capabilities this may be the amp for you.
However, âmore featuresâ may not always be what is desirable. That is strictly up to you if features is what you want.
Granted Iâm in the middle of a corn field in the USA. But these type amps are everywhere here too.
Myself. I went the other direction. Simple to control amps. Minor features to mod the sound of my guitar. Like eq, reverb, tremolo.
While 2 of my amps have loops and line out. I use neither. One of my amps has 2 channels. I use the clean only channel (no master volume), mostly. The other amp (single channel) has a switch for boost and gain. I use boost once in a while, but surely less than a third of the time, high gain I hardly ever use. This amp also has a MV which I surely use and find beneficial, especially for low volume (early breakup) distortion. Both these amps have 3 band eq and reverb. These I do use.
My last amp has no loop, no channels, 2 band eq w/reverb and tremolo. I use the eq and the verb and trem.
All three of these amps have great sound (tone) which is what I want. Few dials and no menuâs to scroll through. I just want to turn on my amp and play w/o spending a lot of time changing my tone via my amp.
I do have three tone changing pedals. They all work just fine into the ft. of the amp. That is, between the guitar and the amp. While I do use the pedals I donât overly do using the pedals. My guitar still sounds like a guitar even when my pedals are on.
This is just food for thought. I would guess that Oz has amps like these too though I have no idea the market in Oz.
Just something to keep in mind.
Do you want to play your guitar or search (chase) the perfect tone that best I can tell is always just around the corner, always just out of sight.
fwiw
My amps are:
2023 fender '65 princeton reverb reissue (all tube) 12w
2020 supro blues king 12 (likely hybrid, solid state/tube) 15 w
2005 peavey red stripe bandit, transtube (solid state w/ transtube which simulates a tube amp). 80w
I would recommend any of these amps to anybody.
I acquired them in reverse order of my listing. So I slowly went to all tube which I think is where the cool tones are (just my opinion).
The bandit likely being the most versatile as it can go from crystal clean to death metal tone + anything between the two. + lower than bedroom vol. to paint peeling, window rattling loud.
Last comment is, all these amps can be too loud when played by yourself in your bedroom, in my case, dining room. All can be dialed back to (below even) reasonable volume level though. This keeps my wife happy and when the wife is happy, so am I⌠
Good luck in your quest.
Not directly, Iâve heard a lot of katana before and it sounds great and the new âampâ on the mk3 might have swayed me more in that direction
The fender is a true modeler though rather than the katana that has a limited set of amps , not sure how much that matters in the end though.
The fender was better for the edge of breakup/blues/vox kind of tones and the katana seemed to do metal/rock better
WOW. You never really know what you donât know until you see a post like this.
Iâll have to take more time to digest this, but a first answer or piece of info for me is that I am a beginner, I love bells and whistles but it is a trap I fall into way too often. so this time around I am doing my best to build foundations and keep it simple.
Having said that, I am following along guidelines more often from the JS vids and team, which is why I mentioned the katana.
I am going to buy a loop pedal, and have that all run into my soundcard, and have the soundcard output into my amp. I think I will look at using the Katana for now, and as I gain more knowledge, start playing with those additional things you mention.
For me for now it is to buy, learn how to use and play my new (soon to be new) electric guitar through and my new (soon to be new) electric accoustic guitar into, muck around and record.
I am doing a sound production/composition/creation course at our local TAFE which is 6 months of learning, so that is going to be a really big bonus for my knowledge, we are learning pro tools and abletonâŚ
This sounds like you are not going to use the elements of either the interface to the sound card (DAW software) or you wonât use the Katana models. Make sure you intentionally are doing that. If not, ask some more questions and make sure you understand the signal chain and what parts of it do which task.
How did you see this connecting up and for what set of uses? You did mention recording, but the Katana doesnât sound like the right thing for just that.
if you have questions about any of my stuff, ask. see this: Really need amp for beginner - #9 by sequences
That sounds like
No sure what you mean by this.
@sequences Not sure what you mean by that. I am going to plug my guitar into the loop pedal, and then into the sound card so that the DAW can record, is that not the basic way of doing this?
In regards to the BOS, it was just recommended in the amps course JS did with the guys from the store. I will be doing more research, sounds like a lot more research.
It is if you are using a computer only, and plugins/DAW
Do you want to record the ampâs sound or the dry guitar sound?
If I have an output from the sound card, and I do nothing on the DAW aside record the track, wouldnât what I hear then in the amp again not playing with anything on the amp be the same ?
However I see where you are going with this. If the effects are coming from the amp, they are not necessary being recorded from the soundcard.
Yes, some amps can output a dry and effects/wet channel , I dont know if the katana does that
Really depends what you are doing
Iâm not sure if you are using a DAW how much use using a looper pedal on the front of it will be either
Fwiw Bret, I bought the Katana 50 MkII to use with electric and acoustic in a home environment here in Perth and love it. I also use a looper with it, no problem. And for more tweaking plugging it into the laptop and using Tone Studio for Boss gives a lot options for tweaking etc.
@RobDickinson got the first part of what I was after.
I canât quite figure out what you want. The way I read your configuration now has problems.
If you try to plug the DAW output into the amp, I think there are some things you may not expect:
I think you should look at the signal flow - maybe download a user manual for the amp you are looking at. Examine how to connect stuff and look for limitations like I mentioned above.
If you want an amp to play in a traditional manner, then you are looking at the right thing, but not hooking it up properly. Youâd want to go from guitar to amp to computer for recording (probably using USB). The amp will apply effects and output the sound you hear to the computer to be recorded.
If you want to just use the computer to capture guitar and then apply effects, then you probably want studio monitor speakers and not a guitar amp. Youâd record your playing, apply effects, then play it back using speakers intended to connect to the DAW. These will just reproduce the DAW output cleanly.
finally, the looper position needs to be considered. if you place it before the effects, then whatever it is looping will get the same effects you have on your guitar signal. Do you want that? If you want the looper to record your loop with its own effect and then play it back as you created it after changing your effects chain, then youâll want the looper to plug in AFTER any guitar effects are applied (usually an effects loop) not sure how this is handled with a DAW. Maybe the DAW does the looping and you wouldnât need a looper? I donât know, but that makes sense to me.
That is all great info⌠there may be confusion in a few things but these explanations did clear up additional questionsâŚ
Iâll do what you said and download the manual, but essentially I would go guitar to looper, into amp, then amp into soundcard and just record thatâŚ.
That is one way to do it, but itâs not the traditional way.
The traditional way (which is, frankly, rather clunky, but comes from an era before digital) is to plug your guitar into the amp, and then record it with a microphone into the recording equipment.
Many people still do this because you are capturing the sound of the amp, the speaker and speaker cabinet, the room acoustics, the microphone, and the pre-amps of the audio interface (AI).
The key thing is that ALL of these things have an important part to play in the sound of the electric guitar on a recording, and if you plug directly into the AI you will be missing most of those; the recording will be âdryâ and not sound right.
Also, what you have described is the wrong place in the chain for a looper, unless you are trying to do something particularly weird.
As @RobDickinson has pointed out, you can do it like this, but using modelling software on the PC, usually in the form of DAW plugins, to emulate the sound of the amp, speaker, cabinet, room, and mic.
In theory, if you output the dry recorded signal to the input of the amp (the guitar input, not the aux input) it will sound correct. But this is an unusual and, I suspect impractical approach and not what you need. I think you need to record the sound of the amp.
The normal recording chain is:
guitar->Distortion & FX->looper->amp->cabinet->microphone->AI->PC
In the case of a guitar amp with onboard FX, you really need to place the looper after the FX, which is why people are suggesting the Katana 100, as it allows you to do this. The Katana 50 doesnât really support this.
The AI and PC should be the last in the chain.
Note that many modern guitar amps have onboard audio interfaces and support modelling of guitar speakers, cabinets and microphones. The Katana is one of these. In other words, if you want to record guitar into a track, you donât need a separate audio interface; you can just plug the Katana USB into your PC directly. It will show up as an audio interface, and you can record from it using the built-in speaker cabinet and mic emulation. You can also record in stereo if you are using stereo effects.
If you want to multi-track many things at the same time as the guitar, this may not be the best approach as, in general, with DAWs you can normally only use one audio interface at a time (the reason is to avoid clicks and pops between AIs that are not synchronised). But if you are multi-tracking one thing at a time, it probably is the best approach (certainly the easiest)
Yes, it does, but only on the USB.
There are 2 stereo channels on the Katana USB: channels 1 & 2 have a wet stereo signal, channels 3 & 4 have a stereo dry signal. For playback, this is reversed.
One (annoying) thing about the Katana is that when you play back through USB channels 1 & 2 it does not go to the speaker, only to the headphones. 
Having said that, for recording and mixing purposes, you probably want to be going through a separate AI with a good pair of monitor speakers anyway.
Cheers,
Keith
Thanks Rob,
Thatâs what I got too from watching YT videos which compared them. I guess, Iâd be in the Fender team then. But the Katana gets hyped so much, I was interested in personal experience.
Cheers,
Keith
Thanks for the video, very interesting! 
You have good insight Bret.
The times (tech) have changed so much since the advent of computers. So many more bells and whistles than when I started playing.
fwiw, many years ago, I thought I wanted to play with more distortion. Then I quit playing for 20 or so years. When I picked it back up. I thought I wanted to play with more distortion.
What I came to realize was that for me, all I was doing was covering up my errors with amp noise (distortion). Any other effects do for that matter. I got my Supro to get said overdrive.
Then, the more I played, the more I wanted to do a song better. Since I was covering up my errors w/ overdrive. I started scaling it back to near no overdrive. When I learn a song, I generally do so w/o effects. If effects are necessary in the end, I can add them in âafterâ I learn the song.
Much discussion about how to control these new modern amps in this thread. Hook up this to that etc.
I keep my recording as simple as I can (since I generally feel Iâm tech challenged). Since my amps are just plain amps (minimal to no connectivity to a computer capabilities), I get my amp to sound like I want it to. Then put a mic in ft. of the amp. Thatâs my connection to the audio interface. A mic. My tones come out like I want generally. I do minor mods in the daw to fine hone my tones of my guitar (eq generally) or my vocals, especially since my vocals to me leave a lot to be desired. So Iâll cover the vocals up with reverb or somethingâŚ
For sure, do that. Heâs a teacher, I am not. Just keep in mind that there are many options. Teachings are a learning process and we all learn and like things a bit different sometimes.
What Iâve described is some of how my feelings on amps has progressed. I doubt my notions are either right or wrong. Just different that what many others have to say.
PS, while I donât have a looper. If I did, Iâd put in line with my amp. If I recorded using the looper, it would become part of the recording via the micâŚ
Ya canât go wrong with whatever ya getâŚ
Unless ya get a peavey audition 20 amp. That amp sounds pretty poorly. I had one and disliked it so much I gave it away. Fortunately that amp is past obsolete so hopefully ya wonât get the chance to get that oneâŚ
Keep in mind. Youâll sound like your amp.
Ya get a great amp and a crummy guitar, your tones will likely sound good. Ya get a great guitar and a crummy amp, your great guitar will not sound so great⌠My old audition 20 is proof of this comment imho. Not that I got great guitars either.
Just more food for thoughtâŚ
Keep on jammin and having funâŚ
