Boss has expanded its Katana series with a take-anywhere 10-watt guitar amp that might be super-portable with a compact 5” speaker, but promises “full-bodied” electric guitar tones.
We say electric but the Katana-Mini X will similarly welcome the signal from an acoustic electric guitar or bass.There are three amp types, or “characters” as Boss refers to them, all powered by Boss’ Tube Logic tech, each with an alternate voicing.
Clean is the archetypical glassy clean and a sound pedalboard platform. Its alternate mode offers the aforementioned flat-response for acoustics and bass guitars.
Crunch is where things head up, “fat and expressive mid-gain” that responds to how hard you are picking. You might even call it the blues guitar channel. Its alternate voicing presents you with more high-end, a little more sizzle on the top when you need to pin the audience to the back of their seats.
Finally, we get to the evocatively titled Brown amp. We can’t help but think Eddie Van Halen. Boss describes this as the Katana’s signature high-gain amp sound, and that it was “inspired by the finest hard rock tones of all time” only deepens out suspicion that EVH’s hotrodded Marshall tone was a lodestar when the Boss R&D department were engineering this.
The Brown amp’s secondary voicing tightens up the low end and offers “crisper highs” which should present metal guitarist’s with the slightly scooped EQ profile and requisite firepower for some serious chug.
There are 10 onboard effects, accessible via two dials. Reverb and delays are controlled via one. Chorus, phaser, tremolo, touch wah, Dreffeter, Synth and octave are all controlled by the other.
Multiple parameters are controlled at once, so as you turn the knob clockwise the effect will get more intense before moving onto the next effect on the dial.
There is an onboard guitar tuner, too, accessed via a button on the front panel. Everything you need is right there. There is a three-band EQ for shaping your sound, plus dials for volume and gain, with a three-way switch to select your amp type, and a push button to access its alternate voicing.
There is a headphones output with cabsim and stereo effects for silent practice, and this output can also send your signal to a DAW for recording.
Push the Bluetooth button and you can pair the Katana-Mini X with a mobile device or laptop and stream audio to it – a 100 per cent useful feature when practising.
Finally, there is a USB port on the front panel so you can easily charge and/or power the amp. You should get up to 10 hours of playing time from a full charge.
Priced £145/$149 the Katana-Mini X is available now. See Boss for more details.
