Watch or read anything about guitar amps and pedals, and you will come away with the impression that to get that juicy edge-of-breakup tone, the amp must be TURNED UP WAY TOO LOUD. No volume, no tone, as if it's some obscure kind of virtue.
Heresy incoming.
A valve amp is a very inefficient way of getting breakup tones. An electrical engineering undergraduate, tasked with that for a final-year project, would not design a Marshall Plexi circuit. They would design an effects pedal.
There. Now You Know.
Breakup-crunch-distortion happens because the shape of the waves making up the signal changes. That shape does not change back if the signal is attenuated later. The voltage level changes, but the shape doesn't. In fact, the more attenuation is applied, the more the sound of the signal is dominated by the effects produced by the changed shape. This is why a neat crispy at (say) 25W turns into an ungodly fizz when we turn the power selector to (say) 0.5W, or even when we turn the Effect Level of the pedal / effect block too far down.
Now I assume you have a) an actual pedal board, or b) an effects processor that lets you move effects blocks around in the chain.
B1) Put the drive / distortion pedal in at the start of the chain. Put the pedal controls at noon. Or wherever you like them.
B2) Follow it with a simple EQ pedal. Turn that down (be prepared for -15dB or more) until the volume is within your limits.
B3) Now crank the drive / distortion pedal to taste, leaving the Effect Level around the middle. Tame the volume by adjusting the EQ volume.
B4) On the Helix I can put the EQ and the drive pedal on the same stomp switch. So when I turn it off, I get the base clean sound, and when I turn it on, I get both in at the same time. If you can do the same, it adds a little more flexibility.
However, we're going to do one thing first.
We need to make sure that your amplifier has a clean sound you can live with. Owners of amps that cost less than about £1,000 will appreciate this.
A1) Set the guitar tone pots to 5. Pickup selector in the middle. We're dialling in the tone on the amp, not the guitar.
A2) No pedals. Clean signal path. All tone buttons and switches on the amp to OFF, and EQ's at 12:00. No pre-amp gain.
A3) Sit with your head at the same level as the speaker and directly in front of it, or you will not hear frequencies over about 2kHz. You want to hear about the same thing that a mic in the middle of the speaker would.
A4) Juggle the guitar and amp volumes until the amp sounds open and clean, and the neighbours are not calling the Police. Make sure the volume pots have the same setting. We want any changes to the guitar controls to vary the basic tone, not lose it.
A5) Play a simple phrase through the amp and listen carefully. What don't you like about the sound? For example, the 12" cube lower-power portable amps - Supros, Blues Jnr and the like - often sound boxy. The Katana without its DSP sounds like someone wrapped a wet towel round the speaker, and even with its DSP, with humbuckers, the base sound is darker than the Essex countryside when all the UFOs have switched their lights off.
A6) Put a 10-band (or more, but not less) EQ at the end of the signal chain, right before the amp.
A7) Whatever it is you don't like, it will be caused by a surplus or deficiency of a fairly narrow range of frequencies: experiment with the 10-band EQ or whatever you are using until that quality of sound goes away. Easier said than done. Expect to be using 10dB+ changes in places, we're not talking tweaks.
DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR OR AMP CONTROLS during this process.
One test is to play a scale across the fretboard with as even a pick stroke as you can. You should not be aware of a change of volume as you cross from one string to the next, and nor should the texture of the sound change. If the 6th string is crisp, the 1st string should be as well.
If the amp is too dark, increase the gain on the 2kHz and above bands. If the amp is too bright, decrease the gain on the higher frequency bands. Increasing the higher frequencies usually increases the definition of the notes, decreasing it makes the notes sound rounder and less distinct.
Another test is to play along with a backing track from You Tube or a streaming service. What sounds okay on its own may sound too muddy against other instruments - unless you really like treble, when it may sound too bright.
It's a hack. It's going to work better on some amps and worse on others. There are a lot of Katanas in the world, and it works on mine.
I cannot stress the "listen carefully" bit. I wanted something close to a Fender sound. When I listened over headphones to a demo of the Vibro Champ, which was kind of what I was after, I realised that it was not sparkly at the top, as I had thought - that was an artefact of the laptop speakers. Also it had more low-end thump than I thought.
You're welcome.
h/t You Tuber Adjustable Bias. His video is excellent: he explains a lot of things about how amps and pedals work that other people don't. My B-hack is a modified version of his volume control trick.
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