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

(Ingredients: a BOSS Katana, a 10-band EQ pedal or 10-band EQ effect in a digital effects board (DEB), 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.

On the 10-band EQ control, add at least 10dB to the 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. 

The EQ control should be the last one in the chain (except for a compressor). 

Connect the output from the EQ pedal or DEB 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. (I turn the volume up on the  McCarty SE, because 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. It should also sound a whole lot more like a valve amp. 

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.)

What's going on? 

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.

(Edited 6/11/2024)

Gain and Volume

Yep, it’s tech time again. There are numerous explanations of these two features of an amplifier, and all those I have seen don’t explain it very well. Mostly because they don’t use a model of an amplifier, which I’m going to do.

Picture your guitar amp. At one end is the guitar jack, which carries a tiny, tiny current from the pickups. If that was transferred across to the speaker, we wouldn’t hear a thing. Nothing like enough power. So we need some more power from somewhere - which is why the amp is plugged into the mains, to feed a transformer that feeds the amp’s circuitry. That feed is run through some kind of “amplifying widget”, which might be a valve, a transistor, some combination of both, or some other device.

This widget takes the guitar signal in one connection, the transformer feed in another connection, and combines them in such a way that the signal from the guitar affects the current from the transformer flowing through the widget. (See electronics textbooks for details.) If the widget works properly, the output will be a signal that looks like the input from the guitar, but on a large-enough scale to drive the speaker.

In summary…

Guitar input signal -> widget
+
Current from transformer -> widget
=
More powerful copy of the guitar signal from widget to the loudspeaker

Gain controls are on the power input side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Gain up increases the amount of power into the amplifying widget, and increases makes the output signal… Gain at 0 = signal direct from guitar with no increase in power, Gain at 10 = guitar signal amplified to maximum input power

Volume controls are on the power output side of the amplifying widget. Turning the Volume up lets more of that power pass to the speaker, so it gets louder… Volume at 0 = no output power, Volume at 10 = as much out as the Gain creates. 

Now here’s the thing. The amplifying widget will change how it responds as more power is applied to it. That’s why turning up the Gain often produces distortion (unless the widget has a kilometer of “headroom”). But when we adjust the volume, it won’t change the way the widget works, because the volume is on the output side, after the widget has done its thing.

However, adjusting the volume will affect the power going to the speaker, and that will affect the way the speaker reacts. Less power and it won’t be able to transmit the fine details in the signal loud enough for us to hear. Which is why a crunchy distorted tone at high volume turns to a nasty fizz at low volumes.

So that’s that.

Recording With The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and Helix Effects

Regular readers will remember the problems I, and everyone else with a Katana, had with recording and playback through the thing. I gave up in the end.

I’ve been trying recording on the iPhone / iPad, using the Lexis Audio Editor, which is intuitively easier to use than the iOS Garageband. For my simple mind, anyway. Record with the mic, playback via the Apple dongle and the Katana Aux In. It kinda worked, but not inspiringly.

Then I got the Helix HX Effects. I’ve been playing with it exploring its functionality for a while. I had registered that it treated the SEND and RECEIVE ports as blocks that could be put in the signal chain. I had got as far as using a RECEIVE port / block to receive music from the phone and pass it on to the Katana.

That works because the Helix software lets us create two logical paths (A and B) between the device inputs and outputs. It’s actually easier to see-and-do on the control software than it is to explain (which is how it should be). Put all the guitar-related effects on one path, and use the other path to take the play-along music. Join the paths together at the end, so the play-along music is unaffected by the guitar effects. Works nicely.

One afternoon, I started thinking about recording again. I don’t want to use headphones, and I want to hear the sound of the guitar from the amp. That was always a problem in the past, because I was getting the guitar effects from the amp. Ever since I got the HX Effects, the amp has been set to the Clean channel and all the effects turned off. EQ’s at mid-day. It’s almost tonally transparent.

The following question now makes sense. Can I use a SEND port on the HX Effects to send a copy of the signal to an interface? The interface connects to the laptop via USB and a recording program can use the USB as an input. Also, can I take the audio out from the laptop and plug that in to the Aux In of the Katana. The HX Effects is connected to the Katana via the L/Mono output socket as usual.

I have one signal path from the guitar to HX Effects to the amp; a separate path from the HX Effects to the laptop to the recording software; and another from the recording playback to the amp. So there’s no feedback loop.

And even better… there’s no way background noise can get into the signal chain because there are no microphones!

I’m using Audacity. It’s recording software with some extras, rather than a full-featured DAW, so it will do nicely for my simple mind. I made sure it could record one track while playing back another, which is kinda key to the whole thing. I can.

All I need to be able to do is send one copy of the signal to the L/Mono output, and another copy to a SEND socket. Which is kinda the reverse of bringing in a signal from the RECEIVE port.

I tested everything I could without actually getting the interface. Everything worked the way I needed it to.

Pull the trigger. The interface of choice for the amateur is the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, which has two inputs: either instrument jack plug or mic three-pin. (Mics need a lot more signal boost than guitars.) I need one short guitar cable (male-to-male jack plugs) to connect the HX Effects SEND to the Scarlett instrument in.

Arrives within 24 hours thanks to Amazon Prime. Took about fifteen minutes to set up, including an online firmware update. Another five minutes to set the recording volume for the guitar.

Now I have to deal with the well-known phenomenon of “recording klutz”, where hitherto fluent playing suddenly misses the beat, because someone turned the red light on. Also with the fact that my playing is, well, not quite metronomic.

Which is why we record ourselves. It’s one thing to know you’re a bit clunky while playing, but another to hear it in playback. It’s so much more embarrassing in playback.

HX Effects + Katana Set-Up

I bought an HX Effects at the end of March, from those nice people at GuitarGuitar Camden, where you can buy any guitar you like as long as it’s a Strat and costs £2,000+ (I am exaggerating only slightly. It is cheaper than Denmark Street where the prices start at £2,000 and ascend very quickly.) Since then I haven’t written anything about my endless Tone Journey.

Imagine being dropped in a guitar shop, given the keys to the pedal cabinet and told to play around all your like. That’s what getting an HX Effects is.

I’m playing it through the Katana, (edit: 9/6) using the Instrument In, pre-amp gain at zero, pre-amp volume nearly dimed, Mid-EQ dimed, Treble and Bass at 12:00. The power amp is set at “0.5W” (/edit) and I control the output with the Master volume.

I’m playing mostly between 65-75 dBA, and have made the following very important adjustment to the amp positioning.

I sit on a barstool about two metres away, on a chair about a meter away, depending on whether I’m using the HX Edit program.

Brief acoustics digression. When the wavelength of a note is less than the diameter of the speaker, that note and those above it will start to “beam” out of the speaker. For a 12” speaker, that frequency is around 1100 Hz, which is about the highest note on the guitar. BUT, guitar strings produce a lot of overtones - fifths and octaves - which are not a lot quieter than the fundamental tone - so that playing A440 produces second harmonics of 1,760 Hz, which will go out like a lightbeam from a big speaker (okay, there are lobes to the side, but only if you’re doing a science degree). Stand to one side or above the speaker and those higher harmonics will pass you right by: the sound will be smoother and lack bite. What I heard over at my friend’s place, where we sit with our heads at speaker level, were all those higher harmonics, which gave the impression of bite and air. This is why mic-ing speakers is more of an art than it should be: where you put the mic affects what exact mix of overtones and bass notes you get.

Chasing tone is to acoustics what cooking is to chemistry: there’s a science underneath it, but mostly it’s applied magic.

The towel under the front of the speaker means I get the overtones beamed at me, so I hear a sound with more air and snap than I would if the speaker was pointing parallel to the floor. This makes a BIG difference to my appreciation of the “tones” I’m setting up on the HX Effects.

I have one Preset with nothing in it, to send the guitar output unchanged to the amp, but despite that the sound through the HX Effects sounds a little tighter and snappier. I’m assuming that the ADC-in / DAC-out conversion, plus any other system circuitry in this “empty path” through the HX Effects, creates some compression. I’m not complaining. It has given me back the neck pickup, which sounded too snarly and nasal through the Katana.

Okay… set-up over. Actual tone-chasing next.

Up Close and Personal With Valve Amps

Recently I visited a friend from back in working days. He has a number of Real Guitars and three Real Amps: a Fender Deluxe Reverb, a Fender Vibro-King, and an Orange Rockerverb. We had a good time trying each one and I did a lot of hard listening. (Because mostly when we hear amps, it’s at 85+ dB and with a lot of distortion, and to repeat, six rubber bands across a dustbin would sound good at 90dB with distortion.)

I learned a number of lessons:

If you’ve never heard a valve amp up close and personal, you’re going to get a shock. Even at low settings, it has a clarity and punch that makes it sound much louder than the dB meter would say it was.

An electric guitar played through a decent valve amp has a heft of sound that is lost in the recording-mixing-mastering process, and it’s pretty much smoothed out by the live mixing desk as well. Raw electric guitars do not sound like processed ones. (As I’ve said before, a lot of what a contemporary guitarist does is produce electronic sounds to enhance the song soundscape.)

There’s a Rock Music Zone of guitar and amp dial settings and volumes at which Rock / Metal tones exist. Below that, the magic vanishes.

Especially a Les Paul (or any double-humbucker) can sound fierce if wound up to 9 or 10, but below that it cleans up to a “jazz sound”, no matter what you actually play and which pickup you’re using.

Strats sound like quieter versions of themselves.

Dedicated pedals sound way richer than the on-board effects in the Katana.

Of course I spent the next couple of days trying to reproduce, however approximately, the clean tones of the Fenders on the Katana.

Eventually I found that the trick is to use the Crunch channel and to keep the volume down, set power selector to 0.5W, with the Pre-Amp and Master volumes set to 100. Add Spring Reverb to taste. I’ve set the Booster Effect Level so that bringing it in or out doesn’t change the volume, and use the Blues Drive and Centa OD to provide a bit of flavour, and the Clean Boost to leave the tone unchanged. I’ve also set the EQ to dampen the 4kHz, 8kHz and 12kHz bands, which can create a shrill tone, especially on the bridge pickup.

Flip the channel from Crunch to Clean and put the power selector at 25W. The result is just as loud, but not as vivid, as the Crunch channel.   

The result has a similar sound, but not the physicality, of the valve amps. The result is far more in-your-face than I would have ever devised if I had never heard the originals.

Am I sold on “upgrading” to a valve amp? Not quite. But that’s another discussion.

Electric Piano + Boss Katana - With Added Sound

(Now updated with sound file)

Plug one end of a guitar (or other male-male) cable into the Katana input. Connect the other end to the Headphone socket of your electric piano (a Roland FP-10 in my case). You may need a 6.35mm to 3.25mm adapter. Turn on the Katana. Select the Clean channel, turn the Pre-Amp Gain to zero, and also turn off any boosters / drives. These don’t work so well. Modulations, reverb, echo and delay all work really well. Adjust volume and power level to taste.

(Blogger doesn’t seem to want to embed audio files on their own, there’s some complicated business with links to upload sites instead. So I put it in a movie file. This was played through the FP10’s internal speakers and recorded on my iPhone.)

You’re welcome.

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.

The Les Paul / Katana Tone Journey - Continued

(Updated at publication date)

The Guitar

Flat-wound 10's and liking it. 

The base setting for the dials is "all the 7's", and the pickup selector default position is in the middle.

I experimented with pickup height, and in the end did what would make a well-bred tech shudder, set the heights by tone. The neck is practically flush with the surround, and the bridge is about where a good tech would put it. Switching from neck to bridge does not lose or gain volume - the SPL meter on my iDevice confirms it. All the problems I have had with the characteristic Epiphone Pro-Bucker tone have vanished. 

The Amp

I was determined to get that Marshall-ish sound. These are the Panel settings

and this is the all-important EQ setting

The power setting is 0.5W. This is not optional. Neither is the 12dB attenuation. I have no attenuation on the 4kHz and 2kHz bands, because that's where a lot of the distortion comes from.

Use the Neck pickup, turn the tone dial to 0 and the volume to 8/9, play above the eighth fret and you will get that creamy 1960's distortion sound. There's a reason no-one needed pedals back in the 60's. Turn the tone dial back to 7 or 8, and all that crunchy Marshall-ish goodness comes back. 

This tone does not play well with anything except the Limiter. But then, if you're using it, you won't want any other effects.

Having done that, I went for the Fender-y sound. These are the Panel settings

And these are the all-important EQ settings.

There's a trick. Just a little touch, the lightest sprinkle, of the distortion effect, to put a bit of bite into the sound and stop it sounding like a sodding jazz guitar. 

The power setting is 25W. This is not optional either. 

This sound is a base for putting the modulation and time effects over: it isn't really a tone in its own right.

Neither of these sounds are the "dials at 12:00" type, and in fact are quite extreme. If they weren't, they wouldn't be iconic. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

I have simplified the options, the idea being to approximate a pedals - amp - speaker set-up. The Chain has all the effects (except Reverb) are before the Pre-Amp.

Recording via USB

I've tried. Lost cause. Too much faffing around. If I want to record, I'll get the specialist gear.

Solving the "Low Recording Volume in GarageBand From My Katana Using USB" Problem

It's time to think about recording. Because this is the +CurrentYear and just playing for your own ears is not enough. And listening to the playback makes it really clear that my fluency sucks.

BOSS swear the USB out can be used as an input to Garageband and other DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations).

There are YT videos on how to do it. Reddit is full of people saying "I can barely hear what it records", and, "it has horrible latency", and getting not very useful advice in return. The Interwebz is full of people giving advice. I will have a post about publicly-available advice coming shortly.

So here is how it's done - and my apologies for oversights. I assume you know the basics of Garageband (or whatever DAW you use), have installed the Katana driver on your computer, and set up a project file to record from it.

My First Law of Doing Stuff is: The task is not the problem.

The task is getting a decent recording in Garageband running on my M1 Air, using the Katana 50 Mk 2's USB connection, while also being able to get reasonable tones through the Katana at living-room volumes.

The problem is to work out why I get a useless waveform in the Garageband track display like this

and then fix it to get a useful waveform like this

After some directionless fiddling around with knobs and dials systematic experiment, it turns out that to get a decent waveform, there needs to be a fair amount of gain on the signal going into the USB connection. On the Clean Amp Type, I had to apply +15dB, but the Brown Amp Type was just fine.

After some more directionless fiddling around with knobs and dials systematic reviewing of the options, I wondered why Tone Studio has a LINE OUT option in the Global EQ, when there is no Line Out on the amp. (Line Out means, in my world, a fixed-voltage analogue output for use in recording). It isn't possible that BOSS really mean 'USB' do they? (Fiddle with settings, play random notes, look at waveform display in Garageband.) Oh, yes, they do. LINE OUT means USB. Because you know, of course we knew that.

So to get a half-decent signal into Garageband, and enough to produce a useable waveform, set the Global EQ to LINE OUT, use the Parametric EQ and give it +20dB of gain. Set that, choose the relevant colour on the Panel and never touch it again.

It won't affect the volume from the speaker.

If you want to apply gain or attenuation to a channel, my experiments suggest using the channel EQ and EQ2 controls. Those apply nice clean gain. The pre-amp gain is an attempt to emulate gain on a valve amp, so it dirties up the signal.

You're welcome.

Tone is Not (Only) In The Fingers

Everyone says tone is in the fingers.

Here's an experiment.

Take your guitar with your favourite schredmeister tone.

Play My Favourite Things, you know, the song Coltrane made a hit.

Uh-huh.

You sound like a guy playing My Favourite Things with a metric tonne of distortion.

Not a wicked schredmeister.

A mixture of sound effects only becomes a tone when it fits the style of music.

Only the Blues can survive anything from an acoustic to heavy fuzz. Everything else only works within a fairly narrow range of tonal variation.

Choose the genre you are playing, and within that, what the song demands.

There is a cottage industry of people creating effects, from downloadable settings for modelling amps, to complicated plug-ins for DAWs.

I'm going to leave DAWs for now, so this is about getting tones from an amp and/or pedals.

The starting point is easier for most guitarists than it sounds: to judge by what the majority of YT guitar guys say, we take up the guitar because we want to play like (enter name of hero(s) here).

I was horribly mislead in my early years by wanting to sound like John McLaughlin, who has himself at one time said he’s what people who don’t play guitar think is a good guitarist. I have no urge to be a virtuoso. Allan Holdsworth leaves me cold (I know, I will be saying several Hail Marys later), as do all the heavy metal shredders and a lot of the jazz virtuosi. Playing hundreds of notes a minute and permuting arpeggios is what people with no musical ideas do. Not that I want to be controversial or anything. Shredding is the rock / metal version of those be-bop solos that relay on playing arpeggios. Done well it sounds and can be impressive, but it’s one of the first styles that will turn up as an AI plug-in.

I liked what Indian raga players did, those long slowly-developing single-string improvisations based around some traditional changes and themes. It has moments of high skill, but always at the service of the groove music.

I prefer Bert Jansch to John Renbourn, even though it is obvious Renbourn has the superior technique. The players I admire most are Neil Young, Larry Carlton, Eric Clapton, Dave Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Cropper, and Frank Zappa before he started shredding. None of those guys play fast, all of them play intense, sometimes funky, and even melodic. All of them can do the important thing, which is make one note count.

All of them were fussy as heck about their instruments and sound. If you want to make one note count, you kinda gotta be fussy about tone.

The search for tone is also the search for soloing style. By now I was realising that what I did / do on the acoustic was NOT going to translate to a Les Paul.

But let's start by getting a) a decent clean tone, b) a decent distortion-y Blues tone, c) some nice Ambient-y sounds.

First Sessions With The Les Paul

Okay. Les Pauls are a touch zaftig.

All electric guitars are heavy, but Les Pauls are the king of heavy. There's a Rhett Schul video about buying a Les Paul, and he weighed the ones he was trying out. 3.8 kg. I paused the video and weighed mine on the bathroom scales. 4.1 kg, just over nine pounds. I weighed my acoustic for comparison, 1.2 kg.

At first it kept sliding to the right from my knee. Was this a bad guitar? Was I doing something wrong? Did I need to wear a strap? All the cool guys in the videos had their LPs resting naturally on their right leg with nothing holding it. Maybe I wasn’t cool enough to do this?

Then I picked up the acoustic, and was reminded it was neck-heavy, so my left arm held it up slightly. Muscle memory that transferred itself to the Les Paul. Which is body-heavy and so kept sliding off, because I was lifting the neck. So I made myself hold the neck down and it stayed on my lap. That took a few hours to become natural. Playing a musical instrument is a lot about getting the physical relationship to it so it becomes a part of you.

Here's something else no-one will talk about.

Electric guitars do not sound great out of the box.

Unless you know what you're doing, which as a first-time buyer, I didn't.

Out of the box, electric guitars sound pretty... meh. When I was choosing in the shop, I was choosing between one meh and another. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Now began the real learning curve with electric guitars.

The Search for Tone. Learning how to play the amplifier and pedals.

In Which I Buy an Epiphone Les Paul Standard

Yep.

I am now a two-guitar household. I've been noodling on that steel-string acoustic since about 1972. I bought it from a music shop in Kingston that has long since gone. It cost the equivalent of £325 in today's money, which is bit more than half the price of the Martins it's a copy of. I never intended to play live: it was for personal pleasure. I never had (or never made) the time to dedicate to learning licks, chords and the like.

I'd been thinking about buying an electric guitar for some time. After watching a few YT videos on guitars, I realised something, and while looking up stuff for this, I found a Fred Frith quote that says it very well:

There is actually no such thing as an electric guitar. This [holding up his modified Gibson ES-345] is not really an instrument...it doesn’t become an electric guitar until I plug it in. And also send it through whatever I want to send it to [indicating his pedalboard]. It’s only this, plus that, plus that [pointing to amplifier], which is an electric guitar.

So if it's my first electric guitar, I have to buy the amp and some pedals as well. (Well, duh!)

Now here's the surprise.

The price of an iPhone 13 Pro with 256GB RAM is £1,049.

A perfectly acceptable, brand-name, entry-level electric guitar, and a perfectly-acceptable brand-name amp, can be had for less than that.

Epiphone (aka Gibson), Mexican Fender (aka Fender), plus a cheaper Vox or Fender amp.

Less than an iPhone. That you have in your pocket.

So towards the end of September, I boarded the train for Epsom, where there is a branch of GuitarGuitar.

What? You expected me to go to Chandler’s. You think I’m rich or something?

Having watched a whole bunch of YT videos, I intended to buy a Mexican (Fender) Telecaster. You know, the twangy one that country players use. Because I’ve always liked the look of Teles and with the right strings and pedals they can be made to sound not like a country guitar. I didn’t want a Strat or an ES335, as those are for people who are going to play live.

Here's the most important thing about buying your first electric guitar: if you know someone who knows their way round electric guitars, pedals and amplifiers, take them with you. This is not a something you can figure out from reviews. I don't so I couldn't, but you should.

Here's the second thing: don't sweat it too much. You might buy The One. But it probably won’t be. It’ll be good, or you wouldn’t have bought it, but it’s not going to be the only one. I may only buy one because of my mature years, but you youngsters are going to buy more than one. And you’ll maybe trade in the first and others.

When you buy the second one, you will have a much clearer idea of what you want in terms of feel, tone, interaction with your amp and pedals, and all that other stuff. The first time is an experiment.

I tried this Tele, that Tele, something else, I may even have tried a Strat, I nearly tried an ES335...

I came away with an Epiphone Les Paul Standard.

For those who aren't familiar, Les Pauls are at the opposite end of any guitar spectrum you want to construct from a Telecaster.

The Les Paul felt right, more comfortable than the Fenders: this is because Les Pauls have a neck length about the same as acoustics. So it felt familiar. Humbuckers have a fatter sound than single-coil (I knew that, but I didn’t know how much fatter it was.) and I was used to the rounder tones of an acoustic. And damn, Telecasters are twangy.

Delivered it the next day. Along with a 50W BOSS Katana (I don’t need 50 watts, but it gets me all sorts of electronic gadgetry), a 3m cable, a replacement set of strings so I don’t buy 11 gauge from sheer habit, and a strap with locking loops. I have picks.