Hi All.
I’m relatively new to the world of guitars and recently came across the song “Playing God” by Polyphia. Since then, I’ve been looking at recommendations on how to tweak the Boss Katana 50 Mk2 to emulate Tim Henson’s sound but I’ve had quite little luck.
However, I did come across a video that briefly described the settings that the video creator had on his own amp that did sound pretty similar to what I was looking for.
Of course, the differences in the software for both amps mean that it will be near impossible for me to replicate what the creator of the video has done. Despite this, I do still want to mimic his sound as much as possible. Does anyone know of the settings on the Boss Tone Studio that could do this?
So it sounds like quite a clean sound and I think on that video he’s using a clean channel on an orange amp preset. So for the Katana I would select clean/acoustic channel as a starting point. The signal chain as described in the video is then Reverb > Compressor > EQ and then amp which sounds a bit unusual (I’d normally stick the compressor in front of the amp and then have the Reverb and EQ after).
He says the only thing he’s using the EQ for is dial back the bass I think so you could do this just on the amp itself…
The compressor will improve your sustain as well as make all notes sound the same loudness (make the notes last longer)
Reverb should be obvious.
So select your clean amp to start with, set bass, middle, treble to 12 oclock. Check what it sounds like (he says he’s using the neck pickup but don’t assume that’'l work for you). Dial back bass if need be. Then add in the compressor, reverb one at a time and check your sound adjusting as you go.
You are NOT going to sound the same as either the guy in the video or Tim Henson (I think I read he uses nylon strings for this song) but you should be able to get something clean and mellow with reverb on that sounds good. It’s a pretty easy sound and the Katana should be capable of producing something close.
For me it sounds like you need new strings, some overdrive, use small amount of gain, that only multiple strings get distorted. use compressor to decrease dynamics, increase volume of single strings. He says that you need reverb too.
The Amp is an Orange AD30, and we should all know what Orange valve amps sound like! I am pretty sure that you would want just off breakup to get the right tone from the amp point of view the rest is pretty straightforward. So if you can find the Orange AD30 emulation you should be ok!
No Orange emulation in a Katana!..hence you need to go for the clean stuff and add some gain.
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