I needed a smaller amp for inside the house as i was tired of lugging the big Vox from the man cave to inside the house, so for Christmas my To Dad, From Dad was a 50W Boss Katana amp.
i am now so amazed by this piece of equipment I considered it worthwhile sharing a small review.
firstly, despite being a 50W amp it has variable wattage so you can dial it down to 0.5W for indoor playing without loosing anything in tone at all - yo can crank it to 13 indoors without waking the neighbors.
secondly what impresses me the most is that I lose absolutely nothing when it comes to depth of sound that my Vox'es 2 x 12" give me. having played on a 2 x 12" amp for so long, i find any amp with only 1 speaker to sound totally anemic - until now.. I dont know the technicalities of how Boss managed to do it, but the single purpose built 1 x 12" Katana speaker deliveres a wall of sound that matches the 2 x 12" I get from the Vox.
as a modelling amp, the 50W has 5 simple onboard amps to choose from - Clean, Crunch, Lead, Brown and then also an acoustic amp setting - not to model an acoustic amp for an electric guitar, but a genuine acoustic amp circuitry to take any acoustic guitar.
it also has the usual effects settings you can expect on an amp these days and 4 memory channels to save your settings to. (more memory channels on the larger version)
however, where this amp really comes in to its own, is when you connect it via USB to your computer and use the Boss Tone Lab app. with the computer app, you have access to about 28 different amp models, and access to just about every guitar effects pedal ever built by Boss, each one able to be adjusted in the tiniest and most technical of ways.
you can then save these new settings to any of the on-board 4 memory channels or save in the computer app, which you can recall in real time to the amp while the amp is connected to a computer.
the amp also allows for direct recording to a computer via the same USB connection, and is the only set up where I dont suffer from any latency issues in any of the freeware recording software I have installed over the years.
needless to say I am blown away by the versatility of this amp - via the computer app, you can also download user tones that other internet users had dialed in themselves and made available via the internet..
for under R5000, this is a brilliant buy!
