Pickup change advices..

skunkwerx

Esp Ltd Phoenix 1000. 

Mahogany neck thru. 

Mahogany wings. 

Current: Duncan Sh-5 (custom). 

Duncan Phat cat P90. 

Heres the hard part. I dont dislike the sound. But my ear is a bit kak so this will be hard to describe.. 

I play with lots of gain, fairly scooped usually. Play at home, no band needs me to cut thru. 

Mainly thru a Katana 100 2x12. 

P-90 for the neck is fine, its in a humbucker size enclosure but I like the odd combination.
I use this for cleans. 

Duncan Custom bridge, for gain. Metal tones. 

For lead/soloing I just change amp channel to a similar setting as my rhythm but with more bass, a little louder and less treble and with reverb and decay. 

Tis the way I’ve done it for ages. 

I havent played much lately and I’ve had a few guitars come and go so this is where its not helping me lol. 

Currently the Custom 5 sounds quite raspy, gritty, almost with a fuzzy element, like a muff. 

Not obviously to that extent. But with high gain thats how I describe it. 

Its probably not that bad tbh, maybe just a grittier distorted tone that I am used to. 

Its quite thumpy/bassy maybe. 

This is on the Katanas Brown channel, which I’ve used as the basis of my Distortion channels, then tweaked. 

I have a feeling some of what I describe is just the nature of that channel. When I switch to the lead channel it does take a lot of the ‘thump/bassyness’ out. 

I guess I need to get the laptop out and hook it up and spend a decent amount of time setting my presets up again as the last time I did this, it was for a guitar which had Emg 81/60’s. 

Obviously I’ve had a tinker with the controls on the amp but not spent much time figuring it out. 

When I say my ear is bad, well the guitars been set up recently, but I did lower and raise the bridge pickup today and I’ll be honest, I didnt hear much if any difference between quite damn low to probably too high.. 

I did test it out on with loads of gain though. Maybe on a clean setting I’d have noticed a lack of output at its lowest settings lol.. I also dont hear much of a difference when splitting it. On clean tones I do, distorted not so much. 

All I really hear is less volume anyway when I do that. 

This is what makes it hard, my ear isnt developed or knowledgable enough to pinpoint what I dont like or what exactly I’m hearing. 

Maybe I do just need a good session with it and a tinker with the amp before going for a pickup change.

Are mahogany body/mahogany neck guitars darker sounding/bassier than mahogany/maple etc dya think? I did wonder if that was playing a part maybe.

ICBM

I think your ear is fine, you just might not have the words for some of the things you're hearing.

My guess is that you've become aware of the harsh grainy inherent tone of the Katana - and once you've heard it, it's impossible to un-hear. I haven't tried editing one with a PC, but given how bad it sounded to me using the knobs I'm not sure there's a lot of point... I don't think it's a settings issue.

I know this might not make me popular with Katana fans .

Funkfingers

Another vote for leaving the pickups alone until you have tried the guitar through a different amplifier AND at “stage” sound pressure levels.

skunkwerx

ICBM said:

I think your ear is fine, you just might not have the words for some of the things you're hearing.

My guess is that you've become aware of the harsh grainy inherent tone of the Katana - and once you've heard it, it's impossible to un-hear. I haven't tried editing one with a PC, but given how bad it sounded to me using the knobs I'm not sure there's a lot of point... I don't think it's a settings issue.

I know this might not make me popular with Katana fans .

I did wonder this to be honest haha. 

I used to have the Katana 50, and when I switched to the 100 2x12 the sound shifted unexpectedly. It was too long ago to remember exactly what changed but I for sure heard a difference even though I copied my exact same settings across from the 50 using the Boss tone centre thing programme. 

Funkfingers said:

Another vote for leaving the pickups alone until you have tried the guitar through a different amplifier AND at “stage” sound pressure levels.

Only other amp I have is a blackstar 10 watt jobbie but its a series one tube amp so I’ll have a plug into that soon and blast it.

Seziertisch

Have you tried changing the cabinet resonance on the Katana? I’m not sure if it’s the answer to your issue but I’ve used the Tone Studio software with the Waza headphones and the cabinet resonance does have a fairly sizeable impact.

https://static.roland.com/assets/media/pdf/BTS_KATANA_eng02_W.pdf

skullfunkerry

I love my Katana, but @ICBM is right; there are some pretty grim sounds in there too. I tend to only use the sneaky amps models - I think the one I use most now is based on a 6505. I can definitely recommend connecting up your PC and having a play with it - the cabinet resonance as @Seziertisch suggests, but also things that you can only get to from Tone Studio like the global EQ or some of the other amp sims. If you’re on facebook there’s a really good Katana group on there, with patches available and (mostly) friendly advice.

Active pickups are a lot tighter in the bass and with a crisper clearer top end than pretty much any passive pickup I’ve ever used: if your amp is still set for EMGs then you’d probably need to roll quite a bit of bass off. The other thing that a lot of modern metal sounds use is a booster or distortion pedal before the amp but with drive set to 0, just to tighten up the low end... again, you can do that in the Boss Tone Studio.

skunkwerx

Seziertisch said:

Have you tried changing the cabinet resonance on the Katana? I’m not sure if it’s the answer to your issue but I’ve used the Tone Studio software with the Waza headphones and the cabinet resonance does have a fairly sizeable impact.

https://static.roland.com/assets/media/pdf/BTS_KATANA_eng02_W.pdf

skullfunkerry said:

I love my Katana, but @ICBM is right; there are some pretty grim sounds in there too. I tend to only use the sneaky amps models - I think the one I use most now is based on a 6505. I can definitely recommend connecting up your PC and having a play with it - the cabinet resonance as @Seziertisch suggests, but also things that you can only get to from Tone Studio like the global EQ or some of the other amp sims. If you’re on facebook there’s a really good Katana group on there, with patches available and (mostly) friendly advice.

Active pickups are a lot tighter in the bass and with a crisper clearer top end than pretty much any passive pickup I’ve ever used: if your amp is still set for EMGs then you’d probably need to roll quite a bit of bass off. The other thing that a lot of modern metal sounds use is a booster or distortion pedal before the amp but with drive set to 0, just to tighten up the low end... again, you can do that in the Boss Tone Studio.

Cheers both. Yeah will have to have a proper play around with it I think.

Can the combo’s do the cabinet resonance bit or is that just for the heads? 

skullfunkerry

The combo has the setting too. I've got mine set to "modern" I think 

skunkwerx

skullfunkerry said:

The combo has the setting too. I've got mine set to "modern" I think 

Nice one, I’ll have to check that out, must have missed it when I was playing about with it before!