Katana MkII or Gen3 users - looking for Blues tones - Livesets & Recording

Gear & Tools Talk šŸ”Š Amplification & Effects
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Hey fellow Blimmers -
I was curious if any of you are using a Katana Amp - I recently purchased a Gen 3 50W and am navigating my way around Tone Studio.
Maybe we can share some Livesets for Blues tones.

Also - any tidbits on using it to record. I have Abelton Live and noticed a lot of latency from USB direct to my MAC. Looks like its time for an audio interface. Iā€™m a little concerned of getting lost in the technology weeds.
Until then - its back to propping up my phone for recordings.

Cheers - Dean

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Hi Dean
I logged on the community to ask specifically about the Katana MK2 50. Iā€™ve had the amp for awhile but just downloaded Tone Studio.

Justin has a number of videos on his site about this amp and Tone Studio and Iā€™m just starting to make my way through them.

I am struggling to get the blues tone that I want and I was hoping that Justin might share a patch (not sure if thatā€™s the right terminology) with us BLIMers that gives us a good blues tone :grinning:

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Btw, this is Ray from Texas. Looking forward to sharing the journey.

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Hi Ray - nice to meet you my friend -

Thanks for the info on Justinā€™s videos - Iā€™ll definitely check those out. It would be great if we can get our hands on some of his blues tones - :guitar:

I did stumble on the Boss Tone Exchange as well - https://bosstoneexchange.com/
Where people are sharing their tones - seems they call them Livesets. I am still muddling through on how to get them into Tone Studio and then into the AMP.

Iā€™m happy to share any knowledge that I acquire on this journey.

Dean

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Hi all,
Jordan from California here, also trying to get tech challenges sorted prior to starting the course, and just learning how to use the Katana MK3 50 watt. Itā€™s to easy to start thinking about a DAW and whatchamacallit, and a doo dad, etc, etc. Iā€™m thinking a phone and a capo might be my recording starting point for a while to come.

Iā€™ll be sure to send anything I figure out regarding easy recording solutions and/or tone your way, and please do the same. Iā€™m excitedā€¦and a bit nervous about the adventure to come. But Iā€™m definitely looking forward to blundering (certainly at firstā€¦hopefully not later) through the material and enjoying the ride.
Cheers,
Jordan

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Hi Jordan, This is unit 0. The best thing you can do is just get a recording of you playing over a backing track.

You donā€™t need Hollywood production - just something you can look back on to see where you were in mid December. A cell phone is al you need.

There will be many people using fancy (and expensive equipment). It is not needed.

Look into that at a later date, if you feel the need.

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Reassuring, and therefore excellent advice. Thanks!

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Dean, @DJP6String you will be asking a bigger group of people - and likely gaining more chance of useful suggestion - if you discuss in the main community section dedicated to amplification and effects.
I will move your post there.

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Hi, the Katana 50 is a very popular amp and there are a lot of users on this forum. There have also already been quite a few questions and answers about its use. Try the search function at the top of the page. You might find some answers to your questions there.

Good luck and have fun!

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It always makes me wince slightly when people ask for a ā€œgreat Blues toneā€ because, in reality, a good Blues tone is the tone that works well for a given Blues song or track, and that can be any tone you like.

Thereā€™s a huge variety of tones used by classic Blues players across the ages ranging from fairly clean to pretty high gain.

Just listen to a playlist of different versions of Born Under a Bad Sign and youā€™ll hear lots of different guitar tones all used on the same song.

Or compare SRVā€™s tone on Pride and Joy with his tone on Scuttle Buttinā€™ or on Mary Had a Little Lamb which are all very different from each other.

Frankly, the best way to get a good Blues tone from any amp is to learn how to use it and to dial it in to get the sound thatā€™s in your head (or as close as possible). You donā€™t even need Tone Studio for that:

  • Turn off all the effects
  • Set the EQ controls to 12 Oā€™Clock
  • Select an amp style
  • Turn up the gain to a level that sounds about right
  • Adjust EQ to taste

But also:

  • Try different pickups on your guitar
  • See what effect the guitar tone knobs have

And, most of all, experiment and play music.

The above applies to pretty much any amp but, on the Katana, you also have additional options on the ā€œBoosterā€ FX control. Again, without using Tone studio, you can select one of three options and use the Booster level to try them out.

One of my favourites was to have the Clean amp setting with the gain up about halfway, and the Blues Driver Booster, which is the green setting on Bank A (unless youā€™ve reprogrammed it with Tone Studio). Experiment with the Booster level as well as the EQ.

But consider that the tone will be significantly affected by the type of guitar you have, due to the pickups on the guitar being different. For example, a Les Paul will not get the spanky single-coil tones that you get on a Tele, or the quacky out-of-phase tones that you can get from a Strat.

The other thing to consider is that the tone you hear on the record is not the tone the artist heard coming out of their amp when they performed it. Itā€™s a recording which is subject to major tonal changes due to the mic, mic placement, room acoustics, and mic pre-amps used as well as EQ, compression, and other changes made by the recording technicians. And itā€™s also been expertly mixed into a backing track.

And the last factor is feel: a good Blues player can make almost any amp sound like them. A good friend of mine who I interviewed recently uses a cheap Roland Cube and his tone sounds great. When they say ā€œtone is in the fingersā€, this is what they mean.

Cheers,

Keith

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This may also be of interest.!

R

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Keith -
Thank you for such a thought provoking response - I want to chase what I think is already out there (because it has to be better than whats in my head)
Time to trust my ears and experiment a little.

Thumbs up my friend - Cheers

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Thank you so much for sharing this Rachel - Great resource !

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Hi @DJP6String

Majik said a lot of what I would say - he just did it better. :slight_smile: I think that any tone can be a ā€˜blues toneā€™. what makes it bluesy is the ryhtm, note choices, and bends.

I agree with Majik that the EQ can play a strong part. Start with a generally clean tone with nothing applied but an amp model and then adjust the EQ. Once that is done, you may like to apply a small amount of reverb. Not too much if you are playing alone/practicing.

@Majik, help me here? I do not know the Katana or Ableton.

  • One thing I didnā€™t see mentioned directly is the delay you experience. I was hoping someone with Ableton might have some advice there. My advice is that adding another USB device (the AI you mentioned) wonā€™t fix anything. The usb from the amp should be no better or worse than adding an interface to the chain. Adding the AI can give you more independent channels to record if you need that, like adding a vocal track.
  • I do not think the USB from the amp creates a latency problem. I use my MacBook or a Linux desktop with the USB out of my Helix or PowerCab with no noticible latency. I use Garage Band, QuickTime, or Audacity to record.
  • One suspicion for your latency is that you have a lot of processing happening in Ableton. If so, turn off everything you can and just use it for listening. See if that reduces the latency to something you donā€™t notice. Then, start to add back the stuff you turned off and notice what caused the latency. Decide if you really need it for what you are doing, or maybe you can add it later, after the recording is done.
  • Another thing you may be doing is listening using bluetooth heaphones. Donā€™t use bluetooth anywhere between your ears and the guitar or you will get latency. BT was originally set up as a very low power (for battery), low-confidence data stream where they expect to re-transmit due to losses. For audio, the sound gets buffered with enough delay that they can usually fix the errors before the audio needs to get played to sytay in time with the previous chunk. This is a large part of the latency we hear with BT.
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Yes, all accurate. The Katana USB is, in my experience, no worse than most other audio interfaces. Tweaking the audio buffer settings may help.

But in most cases it shouldnā€™t matter as you will be monitoring the amp via the amp itself, not by the PC speakers. Latency really only matters for monitoring.

For monitoring, if itā€™s required to listen to a backing track, use wired headphones connected to the Katana and set the audio output device to the Katana. You should then be able to hear the backing track (or click from Ableton) in the headphones and be able to play along and record.

Cheers,

Keith

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Hello-
I recently got a gen 3 Katana, and had to figure this stuff out as well. Iā€™m not sure if you have figured this out yet, but if so, maybe this will help someone else looking at this thread.

First thing I did was find their downloads site, for firmware and tone studio. I did this just by searching my amp name and going to the boss.info result. In the case of my amp BOSS - KATANA-100 GEN 3 | Guitar Amplifier.

There are directions there in the system software link to hook up your amp to your computer via a usb c (amp side) to whatever usbs you have on your computer, and how to check if you have the latest firmware on your amp. Follow those directions, and if you do not have the latest firmware, follow the instructions to install it to your amp. Check again to see if you have the latest firmware (the way this is displayed is if the led lights on your amp match the pattern that the website says is the latest).

Download tone studio for whatever OS you have from the same link as above, and download the drivers for your OS from the same link above.

When you open tone studio if everything was done correctly, and your still hooked to your amp via usb, it should pop up to select the amp that you want to connect tone studio to.

Click on your amp, and then you now have control over all of your amps parameters via tone studio.

For getting things from tone exchange, you can either go to the tone exchange tab inside of that app to download ā€œlivesetsā€, or you can go to the bosstoneexchange website that you shared earlier, and download files from there for your amp. If you do this from the tone studio app they will be accessible from the ā€œLibrarianā€ tab. If you do this from the website, the file will be wherever your downloads go on your laptop (it is a .ts file). Go to the ā€œLibrarianā€ tab, click Import, do import from file not from amp. Now the liveset you imported with show in the Library, click on the liveset to see all the different patches. Click on a patch, and it will load on your amp. Go over to the editor tab, and you can adjust anything or just take a look at how the patch is set up.

Hope this is helpful!

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Thank you Ben - very helpful info

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I need to get some wired head phones and will try this - great suggestion - Thanks

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