I actually first heard about the Boss Katana amps on the Electric Violin Shop website - their description says, "yeah its a guitar amp, but it has an Acoustic amp type that sounds great w/ violin...". When I saw a Katana 100 on sale recently, I just had to get it. I have a couple of tube guitar amps, but the one that's loud enough for the band I play with is too unreliable, and the other isn't quite loud enough. The Katana 100 at 100 watts is definitely loud enough. It's part of the current generation of solid state/digital amps that emulate the sound and performance of tube amps through physical modeling. It sounds really good to my ears with both electric violin and guitar, and delivers the responsive, dynamic performance I'd expect out of a decent tube amp. The Acoustic amp type does sound nice with my Yamaha YEV violin, but I'm not really trying to get it to sound like a fine acoustic Stradivarius or anything like that.
To use the Katana with a band requires foot control to select different sounds, so I picked up the GA-FC foot controller and the EV-5 expression pedal yesterday. The GA-FC now has the Boss logo on it instead of Roland, but the GC guys had to look it up under the Roland name to find it - just fyi for anyone thinking of buying it to pair with a Katana. Roland originally designed it for a line of Roland amps that are no longer under production. The Katana ships with labels for the GA-FC, but the GA-FC that I received already has the new Katana-friendly labeling.
Anyway, it took only a few hours to set up the FX as I'd want them for next week's band rehearsal. You need to plug the USB into a computer and run software to edit the FX in any detail - eg. delay time, mod depth, etc. The disadvantage is you can't edit those detail parameters onstage, away from your computer. OTOH, this design compromise keeps the physical panel of the amp uncluttered and super simple. I do have some physical FX pedals that are quite nice (eg. EHX DMM550TT, Eventide H9 Max, etc.) but it's nice to have 8 preset locations onboard the Katana for multi-FX, and be able to just grab-and-go for a quick jam.
Learning how to use the GA-FC took next to no time at all - you can select from 4 presets at a time, and hit the Effects switch to turn individual FX off and on within the preset - fast and simple. Learning to set up the EV-5 to control wah also took no time - once I selected Pedal Wah as an effect, it worked immediately for that purpose. There are several variations to choose from under the Pedal Wah category btw. If you don't map the EV-5 to anything, it's automatically assigned to volume control.
The Katana requires Roland's USB driver for use with software, which is a bit of a bummer. Anyway, there are two software choices - the official Boss Tone Studio, and an editor by a guy who goes by "Gumtown" that unlocks more FX, more amp types, more flexibility for chaining FX, etc.:
https://www.vguitarforums.com/smf/index.php?topic=20625.0
So far I've only worked with BTS. The latest version(s) of BTS/Katana firmware is flexible enough for me. I might delve into Gumtown's 'ware later. Again, I had all this set up in just a few hours. I probably would have been even faster if I'd read the instruction to "keep" the .pkg file during installation of the driver, and didn't start with a defective USB cable. The longest holdup that I'd blame on Boss is the effects loop routing - they haven't updated their knowledge base yet to mention that they moved the send-return settings out of the system global page, so that you can now set stuff like parallel vs. serial, levels, etc. per patch.
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