Hey All,
As promised, here's a quick initial update. So the amp arrived this morning.
I've spent a few hours playing around with it and, although I've only touched
the surface so far, I thought I'd give you some real quick impressions. Just
to remind people, the Katana Artist is a 100 Watt combo guitar amp that
incorporates a full range 12 inch speaker which, is actually the one taken from
their much much more expensive range called the Waza, or something like that!
From the word go, as soon as I got it out of the box I liked it. It's a really
solidly built amp, no corner cutting for the build quality. Saying that
though, it's the same size as my Blackstar valve amp but, certainly not as
heavy which, is a great relief. A moments panic hit me when I turned it on and
it was dead. Absolutely nothing. Until of course, I discovered that in actual
fact, it had already been on and I'd turned it off smiles! Stupidity aside,
when I eventually turned it on, plugged in my PRS and twiddled a few knobs with
the guidance of my 8 year old daughter, the sound I immediately heard was
absolutely beautiful. I'd turned it to the clean channel with just a touch of
gain to warm the tone. EQ all roughly set to the mid-point with some reverb
and delay that was already on. It had a wonderful warm, full bodied and rich
presence with not a hint of a cheap sounding amp. I could only alike it to
something like a nice warm Fender blues amp. Setting up the various amp
channels is easy. It's just a 5 way rotary knob that gives you, Acoustic
Simulator, Clean, Crunch, Lead and finally, Brown. Brown is for the really
high gain metal level of overdrive. Separate volume and gain controls allow
you to set exactly the levels of saturation or break up you want on each
channel. As for the effects, I've not quite mastered those yet but, they seem
initially ok to manipulate. Already on one of the 4 pre-sets, I found a tone
and effect virtually identical to the sound of the Tremolo distorted sound at
the beginning of Green Days Boulevard of Broken Love. I got really excited and
got the track on the hifi and started jamming along. It was actually quite
difficult to tell the difference between the record and the amp. It sounded so
good!
My next little challenge to myself is to hook it up to my Soundcraft and try
a bit of recording from it in Reaper. If anyone wants to hear what it's like,
when I've done something, I'll make the mp3 available.
Right, well, I've got some things on tonight so it'll be tomorrow again now
probably when I can get back into the studio.
Best wishes all and stay safe!
Steve
