How To Get A Katana To Sound Almost Like A Valve Amp

(Ingredients: a BOSS Katana, an EQ pedal or EQ effect in a digital effects board, guitar of your choice. Has been tested with humbuckers, not yet with single-coils.)

Valve amps have that sound. It pops and snaps, it's clean and clear and as crisp as fresh winter frost.

Which is no-one's description of the sound of a BOSS Katana.

Well, I'm here to tell you how to make a Katana sound like a valve amp. Nearly

Plug the guitar (or the end of your pedal chain or your DED) into the POWER AMP IN socket on the back of the Katana. This by-passes all the pre-amp and effects and sends the signal straight to the power-amp. The only controls that affect the sound are the power selector and the MASTER volume control. Put the power selector to 25W and the MASTER volume at 12:00. Alter to taste later - according to how much oomph your pickups provide.

Turn the guitar volume and tone pots to 7 or so. (On my 549 SE, the lower the volume pots are set, the less audible the effect of coil-splitting, tone-adjustment, and distortion effects from the HX Effects.)

Strike a note.

It should be whoa, that was sudden, or something similar. Tweak the volume on the amp to make it more neighbour-friendly (but not so much the sound hides away in the speakers. I find that happens before 10:00 on the dial.) And it should also be a soft around the edges of the notes.

On the 10-band EQ control, add at least 10dB to the 1kHz, 2kHz, 4KHz and 8kHz bands. (Unless you are a bat or a teenager, you will not hear the 16kHz stuff, but change that if you want). I find the 2kHz and 4kHz bands are better at +12.5dB, but your ears may vary.

Strike a note. Neck pick-up.

Sounds a whole lot more like a valve amp now.

Why?

The frequency response curve of a 12-inch Celestion Gold (available on the Celestion website), the kind of speaker used in valve amps, is

 (All their speakers have a broadly similar curve. Actually, so do all guitar speakers.) 

It comes on song around G on the low E-string, is reasonably consistent all the up to the 18th fret of the high E-string, and then has strong(er) area between 2kHz and 5kHz, after which the response drops off a cliff. 

Guitars produce a trail of harmonics, many less than 10 dB down from the base frequency. Reproducing the sound of a guitar properly means making sure those harmonics are amplified equally. Up to 5kHz, the Celestion Gold is giving good treatment to the first, second and third harmonics of all the notes on the guitar, and to at least the fourth harmonics of notes below middle-C (concert pitch - 2nd string 1st fret) - except for the harmonics between and 1kHz - 1.8kHz, where it's a bit soft.

The Katana speaker is not a Celestion. BOSS say it was designed to match the amplifier. My guess is that the Katana speaker remains flat up to 2kHz and then drops about 10dB - 15dB to 5kHz, when it too drops off a cliff, as all guitar speakers will. (Google can't find anything under various variations on "Katana speaker response curve", so BOSS will have to live with my speculations.)

To correct for that slump between 2kHz and 5kHz, we need to boost the frequencies in that range, which is what my suggestion does.

Give it a whirl.

Just not on the bridge pick-up. It's a pleasant sound on the neck, or in the middle position. But bridge down the low frets... twangy and nasal. But that's bridge pickups for you.

The One With The Girl Standing In A Doorway

 

Yet another staple of street photography. Nice scarf.

£10 for Lavazza Rossa? What The Actual Fuh?

 

£10 for a twin-pack of Lavazza Rossa? It was £6 (on a Nectar offer, I grant) in the summer. A couple of years ago, it was less than that.

Has there been a coffee drought? 

Google says so. Brazil was hit by a drought this summer and production was down. Since coffee is the second-most important substance in the world (after lithium for all those iPhone batteries) for the media classes, you'd think this would have been on the front pages of every UK newspaper. Woe is us, for our Starbucks will cost far, far more. But no, because the UK media are obsessed with Westminster gossip. 

Never mind. The rumour is that the olive harvest was good this year, so we may not be paying £12+ for ordinary virgin oil, like we are at the moment.

None of this would have happened if we were still in the EU. We would have had a sunny summer as well. In fact, it would have been like this...

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(Richard Burton was the original and greatest. I saw him in it when I was a nipper, and it deserved every day of its long run.)

What I Missed In The Lockdowns

Regular readers will have long ago realised that I am not the life and soul of the party. I don’t have people knocking on the door because they “were in the neighbourhood”. I don’t spend a lot of time on my mobile in conversations about whatever it is that those people who do spend lots of time on their mobiles have conversations about.

My needs for contact with the outside world are fairly modest. I like to sit in cafes for a while, watch people go by and hear the background chatter, or walk along a shopping street and see people going about their daily lives, or wander round a bookshop or a record shop, or go to the movies, or maybe some dance, and have something to eat in a restaurant now and again, where the presence of other people is part of the experience.

None of that is too much to ask. It has been provided by cities since the first one was founded only historians know when. Yet it vanished like sunshine on a cloudy day in March 2020, and did not really return until 2023. (Sure there were people moving around in 2022, but only in the second half, and the mood was still a bit odd.)

 

(Going home from the dentist: Piccadilly Circus 13/1/2021 18:50)

When discussing the Lockdowns, I have tended to focus on the feeling of threat, not from a bad flu virus, but from the Government, the so-called “experts” advising it, and the local council officials implementing and even interpreting many of the ever-changing regulations: they were unaccountable and unregulated, and the “experts” were often acting from ideological motives that don’t bear examination. That would scare anyone.

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate that what I really missed was the very little I asked of and for my social life. Partly because, well, who could really miss so little? Does it even qualify as a “social life”?

Well, it doesn’t matter whether someone else doesn’t call it a social life.

What matters is that I missed it and it affected the way I felt. It wasn’t much of a mooring cable to the rest of the world, but it was enough, and when it was cut, I drifted.

What about the work? I was working from home, dealing e-mails, taking part in conference calls (and Teams when they finally shipped us decent laptops in autumn 2020), and so on. Wasn’t that a mooring cable?

Well, clearly not. Work is not the same as life - which is why we contrast it in the phrase “work-life balance”. “Relationships” at work rarely translate into acquaintanceships in real life. A busy work life does not fill the gap of an empty personal life.

People with domestic relationships may not have felt the lack of being able to wander through the daily tide of people. Perhaps they even found it a relief.

I didn’t.

Aspects of Immigration: Canada

I am going to let this one speak for itself.

   

Of course, nothing like this happens in the UK. There are no universities which depend for their continued liquidity on the colossal fees from foreign students, and there's no suggestion that those students are awarded degrees about one grade up from what they deserve, because the examiners are aware of the realities of academic economics. Oh. Wait. There are. In fact, find one that doesn't.

The Coming Starmer / Labour Decade

Everyone who didn't vote for him, and a few who did, are now piling in on Sir Kier Starmer. At any moment, they hope, another revelation about who paid for his underwear will remove him from office. Just like the Left did when Thatcher got in.

Nope.

Ain't gonna happen. (Also just what happened when Thatcher got in.)

He's here for the next ten years, because the Conservatives will not be electable in 2029, and will not be able to assemble a coalition government.

(Also just like the 1980's, but in reverse.)

Good times (1990-2008) elect weak leaders; weak leaders make bad times (2008 - 2034); bad times elect strong leaders; strong leaders make good times.

We are now at Peak Weak. First Boris Johnson - who himself admitted that it was ridiculous he was Prime Minister - and now Sir Kier Starmer and his cabinet. Rishi Sunak wasn't as bad as either of those, but he wasn't going to bring good times either.

So get ready for ten years of posturing, distracting, and oblivious legislation and social policy.

Labour has two jobs.

The first is to reduce the cost of the NHS to the taxpayer by at least a half, while improving Maternity, Neo-natal and A&E services.

The second is to stop and reverse illegal immigration.

I hope they do one or both.

Because I don't want to see the state of this country if they can't do either.

You won't either.

And you need to pray that competent people choose to go into politics in the next ten years, or you will just have more weak leaders.