View the full lesson at Boss Katana mk.II REVIEW | JustinGuitar
iIncredible and helpful thank you for doing these videos…love this amp
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I admit to being disappointed. I have a Yamaha Pacifica 612, which I have been playing through a Fender Mustang micro, and it works fine (although the tone control needs to be on brightest, or it sounds like someone playing in the next room). Now I have the Katana 100 mk11. Clean sounds are generally ok, but most settings are unusable because of the excessive noise, controllable only by turning the guitar tone knob all the way down. Using the micro, the guitar volume knob is exactly that, just changes the volume. With the Katana, it becomes really noisy as the volume goes up, then the noise goes down again at full volume (but it is still noisy on most amp settings). I thought it must be the cable, so I plugged in my Taylor acoustic electric and played on acoustic and clean settings, and there was no noise at all. OK, those are not the noisiest settings (lead and brown are), but there is always noise from the Yamaha.
I had one of these when I was playing electric. I can’t remember the details, because I haven’t used it in ages, but the volume, gain and main are all intertwined. You are suffering too much gain, most likely and not controlling it separately.
It is easier to figure out using Boss Tone Center or Katana Librarian rather than the knobs. The knobs are somewhat opaque in how the adjustments all affect each other.
You should be able to get excellent sounds out, and I do remember that many settings had way too much gain and distortion. It needs to be backed off all the way, then dialed into your preferences.
Yes, like a lot of conventional amps. Understanding the relationship between the channels, gain, levels, and master volume often takes a bit of experimentation.
Cheers,
Keith
Did you try going with Noise Gate to max?
Thank you. I’ve not used a guitar amp before. The guitar is also fairly new, and I previously plugged it into my Korg Kronos and used the Mustang micro without detecting noise, so the level here made me wonder whether there is a technical problem and I should return the amp. Or the guitar, I guess, but given it was ok using other things I presume that is ok. The bit that confuses me the most is that the noise increases when I first turn up the volume knob on the guitar, and then decreases somewhat at the highest setting.
Not yet, I’ll try that. My concern is, why so much noise in the first place? Less about how to control it. That is, I wonder whether there is a fault.
I think you may need to set the volume where you like the sound and use the master to increase volume.
I believe that guitar has a humbucker pickup and two single-coils.
Single-coil pickups are notorious for noise. Usually, touching the strings should remove most of the noise.
Do you still get noise issues when using the humbucker pickup?
What are your amp settings? In particular, where do you have the gain set, and are you using a boost?
The Brown setting is a high-gain setting, so you should expect a fair bit of noise on that unless you are muting the strings. The same, to a degree, with the Lead setting.
But if you are using the Crunch setting with the gain set at around 10 O’clock, you should be able to get a decent sound without too much noise.
Cheers,
Keith
I thought about the pickup, but switching to humbucker-only does not appear to make a difference. I should say that it isn’t just that I don’t understand enough about interactions between the amp effects to choose a good setting (which is true), but many of the patches downloaded via Tone Studio are completely unusable because of the noise. Presumably, those were just fine for other people (and I detected no noise in the video that demonstrated them).
A lot of the settings I come across to download are quite high gain settings. These are difficult to control because every tiny bit of string noise or RF interference will be amplified.
As a minimum, we need to have a reference point to understand your problem from, and from which to give advice. Without knowing what your settings are, we simply cannot help you.
My recommendation is to start with lower gain tones, like the setting I described above. You should be able to get some decent crunch tones which are good for playing rock music without too much noise.
If you are muting the strings and not playing you shouldn’t have much more than a bit of gentle background hum.
Cheers,
Keith
I don’t think we’ve actually defined what type of noise we’re talking about. Hum, buzz, distortion/breakup, etc?