Boss Katana MK2 advices request

[old gust]

Hi there
As the title says I am looking for general advices for tone sculpting on the boss Katana, especially regarding crunchy/overdriven/fuzzy/saturated sounds
I get confused between the gain of the channel and the gain of the pedal, should the gain come mostly from the amp and the pedal just color the tone or the other way around ? Should I use EQ at the very start of the signal chain or at the very end ? This kind of questions that get me contemplating tone studio absentmindedly for hours while fumbling around

[thick bridge]

So, you're asking

1. Should you use gain from the amp or gain from the pedal?
   With a distortion pedal, you can use it on a clean amp to get a distorted sound simply by pressing the pedal. So if you're playing a song that has a clean section then jumps into overdrive, you press down on the pedal and boom, distortion.
   What I like to do with distortion pedals is push the amp a bit, so with distortion at 0 and level 10.
   This tightens up the amp when you're playing with a high gain sound.

1.5 Should you let the pedal color the tone
Most distortion pedals have some eq inside, but it's not audible enough to make that big of a difference, compared to the second point.

2. Should you Eq at the front or the back of the signal chain
   Eq at the back (after the speaker) or in the "fx loop" (before the speaker) are the most effective options to "Eq" the sound to do tone shaping.

[old gust]

Hi, thanks for the advices ! I've done a fair bit of testing and there's one strange thing that I observed during this time : overdrive and fuzz pedals are great on almost all channels with correct settings BUT distortion pedals I find almost unusable on the clean channel (not even tried the others since it really isn't the point I think design-wise) with the exception of the RAT (then again the Proco RAT is my favorite distortion pedal ever so I might be biased) and maybe Guv DS, is there any obvious thing that I could be doing wrong that could cause them to sound so unpleasant to my ears ? I don't know how to describe it but the words that come to mind are "cardboard" and "beehive", I'm not pushing them like crazy either, I think the max gain I've done is like 50% ?

[thick bridge]

i personally run my distortions through the fx loop

like the metal zone, which is often described as "beehive" or "harsh"

it sounds insane through the fx loop.

so it also depends on the type of distortion pedal you got

often times when youre putting it in front, don't put tone all the way up, that makes it harsh
distortion also doesn't need to be all the way up, for distortion, you need less gain than you think

[thick bridge]

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