A look at my brand-new Boss Katana 100 MkII guitar amp.

[DrNomis_44]

Lets have a look at the back panel.

You have an IEC mains power socket, self explanatory.

Next, you have your FX Loop Send and Return sockets, you can use these if you want to add some external FX pedals, or processors to the amp.

Stereo Expand switch: This switch is used to enable the Stereo Expand feature of the Boss Katana 100 MkII, you can connect a second Boss Katana 100 MkII up to the amp to get stereo Delay or Reverb effects.

Line Out/Power Amp In: You can use the Line Out socket with the Stereo Expand switch to get stereo effects if you plug it into the Power Amp In socket of a second Katana 100 MkII, or, if you set the Power Switch to Standby, you can plug from the Line Out socket into a mic/line in socket of an audio interface for silent recording, or into a live band P.A. mixing desk.

Next is a USB 2.0 socket, you can use this to connect the Katana 100 MkII up to a computer, Mac or PC, and use the amp as an audio interface (it has it's own ASIO or Core Audio driver), or, you can use a free app called Boss Tone Studio that Boss offers for free, to create your own tone presets, the Boss Katana 100 MkII amp offers a total of 8 tone preset channels, that can have up to 5 effects chained in series at once, the Boss Tone Studio app comes with 60 emulated effects, so you have quite a large range of tonal options to choose from, I'm starting to get the hang of using the Boss Tone Studio app to create my own tone presets, so far my experience is, it is actually quite easy to do so, I found it pretty intuitive.

Note that when you first try using the Boss Tone Studio with your newly-bought Katana amp, you may get an error message saying something about a wrong version, to fix this, you need to go to the Boss website and download the latest firmware update for your model of Katana amp, then follow the directions Boss give for updating the firmware, doing this got my Katana amp working with the Boss Tone Studio app, it was quite a painless thing to do.

Next, there's a little 3.5mm input socket labelled Aux In, you can use this to plug an mp3 player into the amp for a backing track for practicing, or jamming along to your favorite songs.

GA-FC: The Katana 100 MkII is fully compatible with the GA-FC foot controller that Boss also manufacture and sell, I would very strongly recommend buying one of these if you're buying a Boss Katana 100 MkII, makes switching between the 8 tone preset channels very easy to do during a live band performance onstage, while you're at it, consider also buying the protective amp cover Boss sell.

EXP Pedal: you can plug the optional Boss expression pedal into this socket to control volume, or Wah effects.

And Finally......

Phones/Rec Out: You can plug a pair of headphones into this for silent practicing, or you can plug this socket into an audio interface to record in a Daw (Digital Audio Workstation) software.