I brought the Katana in and rigged it up with the computer today - absolutely great !
I wish I’d looked into it sooner but the amp worked as I wanted it to out of the box, so I just made the adjustments and plugged in my Vox Tonelab and later, my Helix. I do have the foot controller for the Katana and with that I can set up eight different sounds and recall them at the touch of a button, but I need to use my foot volume pedal with it to do the swell thing.
With the Helix, I use a clean sound on the amp and all my changes are from the Helix, which has two different echo units set up on it, the Meazzi and The Binson. I have programmed it to allow foot-switchable heads on and off, four of them, along with other buttons set up as ‘Tone Bender’, ‘Tremolo’, ‘Chorus’ , ‘Octave’ , ‘Reverb’ and Compressor. At the touch of a footswitch I’m able to dial in whichever echo pattern I need - or not, then add any of those others to mix with the overall sound and it works for me as there’s an expression pedal built in.
Getting back to the Katana and extra programming from the computer, I’m looking at setting up an external Tone Bender and Volume pedal, so that I can do a show with the eight choices that can be stored on the Katana pedal. That would make the Helix redundant, but whether or not it is doable remains to be seen, as I also need an acoustic option too. With the amount of stuff I need to cover, there is only room for one Shadows patch, so maybe the Hall & Collins may come into play at some point. I started this today so it’s all new
As always, I am having tremendous fun doing this, which is what it’s all about.