At this point, the Katana user community is big and enthusiastic. And a sizable, online portion of that community spends a lot of time speculating about what the next generation of Katanas will bring. By the time you read this review, the cat will be out of the bag, and seven new Gen 3 Katana models will hit guitar shop floors. It’s likely that just about every facet of the Katana’s audience, from dedicated, to casual, to curious will be intrigued if not blown away with what the newest generation delivers for relatively little cash.
"The brown patch communicates the nuances of tapping and palm-muting techniques as well as a responsiveness that I might have attributed to tubes in a blindfold test."
Features Overflowing
The flagship of the line, the Katana Artist Gen 3 reviewed here, is a 100-watt 1X12 combo amp with a custom-designed Waza G12W speaker. So far, so simple. But as one look at the rather daunting control panel will tell you, the Artist Gen 3 does a lot.
Boss is careful to distinguish their Tube Logic architecture, which captures the behavior of many individual components in a tube-amp circuit rather than just the output of a tube amp itself as some modelers do. And the depth of the control set reflects that thinking in many respects.
There are eight sections on the front panel: amplifier, equalizer, effects, tone setting, solo, line out, global EQ, and cab resonance. Within each of these control categories, there are many knobs and buttons that enable control of practically every facet of your tone—from the virtual “air” in your line-out signal to wattage (max, half, .5 watts) to cab resonance (deep, modern, or vintage). On the back panel, meanwhile, are line-out and USB jacks for direct recording; an effects loop; as well as jacks for using external modelers and preamps (via the Katana’s own AB power section).
The Katana Artist Gen 3 has five independent effects sections with over 60 Boss effects to choose from. There are also six basic amplifier types—brown, lead, crunch, pushed, clean, and acoustic. There’s a variation button to select an alternate voicing for each amp type as well and a new bloom button, which enhances the power stage with more bass and more-defined attack.
In the tone setting section, you’ll find pushbuttons for bank, CH1 through CH4, and panel. The CH1 through CH4 buttons recall sounds you save (in which case the knobs won’t reflect the settings you hear). Pressing the panel button lets you use the amp in WYSIWYG fashion. This is where most people will start their Katana voyage. But if you just use the Katana Artist Gen 3 as a basic channel-switching amp, you’ll miss out on many of the amp’s most compelling features.
Optional But Recommended
If you’re only going to use the Katana Artist Gen 3 for home practice and recording, then the amp gives you just about everything you need right out of the box. However, if you’ll be using the amp in a live setting, an optional—but I’d say vital—accessory is the 6-button GA-FC EX footswitch. At $149, it’s a considerable expense for an optional accessory, but it makes leveraging the amp’s horsepower, depth, and flexibility in gig situations easier and more satisfying.
The footswitch enables super-smooth transition between patches. You hear none of the pops or lag that you hear even in big-ticket tube amps when you switch between channels. And before you balk at the extra expense, remember that changing amp channels and effects simultaneously in real time with a conventional pedal switcher would require a significantly more expensive switcher, so the GA-FC EX’s price tag is actually reasonable if you compare it to a similarly capable switcher.
Another optional accessory that is very useful is the BT-Dual ($59), which allows you to connect to the amp via Bluetooth. The BT-Dual lets you do a lot—from basic things like playing music from your phone wirelessly (useful when loading backing tracks to jam with) to advanced functionality in the Boss Tone Studio app, which lets you dive deeper into the Artist Gen 3’s customization capabilities.
From your smartphone, you can use Tone Studio to create chains of effects and amp settings. You can also use the app to change between other saved presets. What’s amazing is how immediate and seamless the patch changes are. While letting an open A chord ring, I toggled through various factory patches like spongy crunch, bloom crunch, and sparkle clean, and there were no delays, dropouts, or weird noises between patch changes. The volume levels of the respective patches were within a similar range and the changes felt organic. The Tone Studio app also allows you to edit parameters that are not accessible from the amp control panel alone. For example, you can access the “air feel” settings as well as hidden parameters like mic distance, position, and type, and ambience pre-delay and level, which lets you further sculpt your sound for line-out recording. You can also use the app to access four hidden tonal templates for the contour mini pushbutton.
Tone Mastery
The Katana Artist Gen 3 is loaded with more features than you’re likely to use. But features aren’t worth much if the sounds aren’t there, and across the spectrum of tones I checked out, the Katana impressed.
Just about every preset I tried could form a solid core sound for the genre it was designed for. The brown patch, for instance, with its full-bodied gain and arena-style delay, is ideal for Van Halen leads and communicates the nuances of tapping and palm-muting techniques, as well as a responsiveness that I might have attributed to tubes in a blindfold test. In general, high-gain settings deliver heavy bottom-end output that can be room-shaking—even at a modest volume.
Clean sounds are full and exhibit quite a bit of natural-sounding sustain, which brings melodic fills to life. In fact, the Katana Artist Gen 3 could make an excellent pedal platform—and the amp’s effects loop makes pedals very easy to integrate. But there are so many excellent drive and effects options built in here that, unless you have very specific pedal sounds you rely on, it would almost be a shame to not take advantage of the onboard options and keep your rig to a streamlined minimum.
The Verdict
Like most Premier Guitar readers, I’ve invested thousands of dollars into many amp and effects setups. But the reality is that the Katana Artist Gen 3 can do many of the things my more expensive setups can do, and do them exceptionally well. It sounds amazing in many applications, and can be used as a professional stage amp, home practice amp, and at the front end of your recording rig. And at $599, its capabilities are pretty extra-astounding.
Boss Katana-100 Gen 3 Amp Demo by Tom Butwin | PG Plays
Simple Complexity
The Catalyst has plenty of bells and whistles. On the surface, though, it looks a lot like a simple, conventional 2-channel amp. There are knobs for boost, gain, bass, mid, treble, presence, channel volume, effect, reverb, and master volume. There’s also a knob that lets you choose from six original amp models: clean, boutique, chime, crunch, dynamic, and hi gain. Mini buttons let you save and choose between two channel presets or engage manual mode, where what you see is what you get. Other mini buttons allow you to engage boost, tap tempo, and select effects and a tuner. On the back panel is an output power knob that lets you choose from mute, ½ watt, 50 watts, and 100 watts. There’s also a USB jack, a DI out, and an effects loop.
Six Amps in One
There’s not enough space in this review to cover all the amp models in depth. And I suspect that for many players even just a few used through the full range of their clean and dirty variations will be everything they ever need. Still, the Catalyst’s abilities and potential—especially relative to its price—will excite any potential user.
I started my own experiments with the boutique voicing at the ½-watt output setting. Predictably, there’s not a lot of output in this mode, though it’s a lot of fun as a practice amp. At the 50-watt output setting, though, I could hear and feel the amp in a more complete way. There was headroom to spare and it’s impressively dynamic and responsive to picking nuance. And it was surprisingly easy to get SRV-style bite out of otherwise clean, blues-tinged phrases—again, very impressive. The useful boost knob lets you dial in extra kick, and, thoughtfully, each amp model has a specifically tailored boost voicing. In boutique mode higher boost settings added a lot more gain to the amp model’s cleanish sound, and the saturation sounded and felt organic.
The chime model, loosely inspired by a Vox amp, is warmer and thicker than the boutique model in cleaner settings. But when I engaged the boost (with the knob at noon) and set the gain knob around 11 o’clock, the amp positively screamed—generating an aggressive and at times piercing sound that would reward a player with a commanding approach like Eric Gales or a 1960s-influenced guitarist who loves the potency of single-note lines.
The high-gain model, meanwhile, is a fire-breathing beast. With the gain at 11 o’clock, there is plenty of bottom end, and the sensation of the amp moving air becomes more apparent. Engaging the boost softened the attack slightly, which made soloing more liquid. But there wasn’t much of a difference through the range of the boost knob from noon to max. The amp model is pretty saturated to begin with.
There was headroom to spare and it’s impressively dynamic and responsive to picking nuances.
No Jumping Through Hoops Running Loops
Using the clean model, I ran my Yamaha UD Stomp delay through the effects loop. The results were dimensional and often sublime. The power-amp-in feature lets you plug in a pedalboard and play it directly into the Catalyst 100’s power amp. I used another setup, with a Mesa/Boogie V-Twin preamp pedal, directly through the Catalyst’s power amp and it sounded phenomenal. And even though the preamp is bypassed in this mode, the boost function is still active. Set at 10 o’clock, it added a nice final touch to the Mesa/Boogie preamp’s clean channel, making it sound discernibly richer. In my humble opinion, just the power amp and speaker cabinet alone are worth the $399 price.
Though Line 6’s acclaimed HX technology is embedded in the Catalyst, the company did a good job of keeping options easy to manage and navigate. There isn’t an endless buffet of effects, as you might expect. There’s a standalone reverb, and apart from that you can only use one additional effect simultaneously, unless you bring your pedalboard to the party.
In total there are 18 effects, grouped into three categories: delay, modulation, and pitch/filter—each with a corresponding LED in green, blue, or purple, respectively. If you’ve used Line 6 products before, many of these excellent effects (and the color coding) will be familiar. There’s the fabulous dynamic “ducking” delay, some modulation models based on iconic pedals like the MXR Phase 90 and others, and some classic Line 6 pitch/filter effects like growler synth and synth strings. If you do want to use more effects simultaneously, the effects loop is an excellent way to patch in external effects.
The USB hookup, by the way, enables connection to a computer so you can use Line 6’s editing software, which allows you to dive deep into tone editing or just fine tune a few things. I imagine that, in reality, most users will just figure out how to get a couple of core sounds directly from the amp, save them, and just go with that. But it’s always great to have options, and if you’re someone that actually maximizes the capabilities of modelers and editors, you’ll have a field day with the app.
The Verdict
For any guitarist looking for an all-in-one, plug-and-play setup for practice sessions, live shows, and recording (you can record directly using both USB and the built-in DI with cab simulation), the Catalyst, at $399, is pretty tough to beat. It’s got more features than many players will need, but what will count for most of the target audience is how much you can accomplish without diving too deep. And though the price might suggest otherwise, Catalyst isn’t just for beginners or intermediate players. Any professional guitarist that’s tired of dealing with tube related maintenance and expenses will be happy with many of the sounds here.