One Journey Ends, Another Begins

I've spent a couple of months thinking that I'd gone as far as I could with the Katana and the Les Paul, and needed some new gear to improve things. Who isn't tempted by a nice shiny white Jazzmaster with a red flecked pickguard? And of course, Valve Amps. And pedals. Lots of pedals.

A £3,500 Matchless combo with £1,500 of pedals on a board (more easily spent than you might think) would do the trick nicely. An £800 Tall Trees amp into a Celestion-equipped speaker cab, with the same £1,500 of pedals, would sound different-but-as-good, again, with the proviso about playing volumes. I heard a fabulous little vintage Fender amp in my last visit to Regent Sounds on Denmark Street, a snip at £4,999. They also have a nice 5W Cornell Traveller Combo for £695 (at time of writing). Lots of options, but do they sound convincing at 60-75 dB?. (Many of these amps have attenuators between the power amp and the speaker, but if it was easy, Ox Boxes would not sell for four figures.)

That's the key. if I want to hear what I'm playing through a loudspeaker, playing at bedroom volumes may compromise the amp's ability to produce the sounds I'm looking for, so that there's no significant improvement over the Katana (or any other modeller). Which means I might wind up testing the patience of guitar shops around London, while I don't find anything in their stock that sounds worth-the-money better than the Katana 50 II at 60 - 75dB.

(You Tube reviews are absolutely useless in this regard: the majority of them wind up playing distortion in the high 80's and low 90's, if not more, often displaying SPL meters proving how loud they are playing. I could stretch six rubber bands across a dustbin, mic it up, run it through a distortion pedal, and it would sound amazing at 95dB.)

If I'm content to listen over headphones (wired, too much latency with bluetooth) then I have options based on Multi-FX / Amp Sim kit, DAWs and plug-ins. This is what the professionals do when they are playing in venues with built-in PA systems or recording studios: these take output direct from the electronics, while the band will be listening through in-ears (live) or headphones (studio). Professionals only need an actual amplifier for venues without a PA.

Look at where a lot of those You Tube Guitar Gurus work: sitting on a computer chair, in front of an iMac running a DAW, surrounded by amps, cabs and other gear, with an extensive knowledge of how various computer programs - on the Mac or embedded in a piece of kit - work. Yep, in the digital world, everything becomes a computer, and everyone becomes a computer user.

No thank you. I already did that for a great many years. (What about the BOSS Tone Studio? To me it does not feel like 'using a computer'. It feels like 'twiddling a lot of dials', which is an analogue thing to do.)

So faced with the fact that spending money on gear might leave me right back where I started but a few quid shorter, I went home and had more serious attempts to get the two main tones - Marshall-ish and Fender-y - that I wanted at the volume levels I needed. (Yes, that amp is as good as everyone says it is. Somewhere in it is the tone you are looking for, though it may be the result of an odd combination of settings.) The details are in a previous post. Since then, that restless urge to upgrade or buy different gear has waned.

The final touch was setting the Neck pickup height by ear. This will cause Techs to roll their eyes, but if it's what it takes, it's what you have to do.

The Les Paul / Katana Journey is declared ended.

Now I’m starting to think about what I play, and that's really baking my noodle.