Boss has expanded its third-generation Katana series with a compact 25-watt digital guitar amp combo that’s the ideal size and spec’d for home practice, and this little thing costs just $199.
It has a single 8” speaker, is housed in the familiar Katana styling. So familiar is this look that you’ll swear you’ve seen the Katana-25 before, until something is beside it for scale. And crucially had has Boss’s Tube Logic tech under the hood to make its modelled amp sounds all the more convincingly ‘real’.
As Boss explains, Tube Logic makes the Katana series behave a little like a tube amp, give you “authentic tube sound and feel that’s the benchmark among pro players everywhere… Katana-25’s speaker and 25-watt reactive analogue power section [working] in harmony to create a highly interactive playing experience with rich bass, sweet high-end detail, and punchy dynamic response”.
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In other words, you have a practice amp that sounds good, sounds legit, and then has a great abundance of digital features that today’s players have come to take for granted, but really, we shouldn’t – and of course there is a huge range of Boss guitar effects onboard.
All these features can be a little intimidating but Boss lays this out much like a regular guitar amp. You still have the Gain and Volume controls, Bass, Middle and Treble, too. There is a Master Volume dial with a low-power toggle switch to put them amp down to a half-watt setting that allows you to really push the amp a low volumes.
Almost everything you need to control the amp is on the front panel, including the connections for USB-C, the mini-jack headphones/recording output, 1/4”external footswitch input, and the Tone Setting section that also includes the onboard guitar tuner.
Boss is aiming this at “new and returning” guitarists so we would hope this would be easy and intuitive to get started on. You get six core amp sounds, covering all the main electric guitar tone styles from glassy clean chime etc to saturated high-gain, and one of these is voiced for acoustic electric guitar, too.
There are more than 60 Boss effects available and you can use up to five of them in any one sound. The Katana-25 also has tap tempo for time-based effects such as delay and modulation. When you find a sound that you like, you can save it down to one of the 30 available user preset slots in the Tone Settings section.
(Image credit: Boss)
The amp comes preloaded with 20 factory presets, and you can make tweaks to the preamp settings without having to reach for your smartphone and the accompanying app to make edits.
Now, the Boss Tone Studio app. This is where you can make deep edits and really organise your sounds, and access more from the Boss Tone Exchange community.
(Image credit: Boss)
This being 2026, you can browse YouTube on the Tone Studio app and play the content through the amp to practise along to, and you can actually cue in effects changes – e.g. going from some super-clean chorus sounds for an intro into a high-gain rhythm tone – in any external audio so you can play along and the amp changes the preset for you.
This all seems a little bit like having your one guitar tech working your pedalboard from the side of the stage except you’re probably using this in your bedroom.
The Katana-25 is available now, priced $199. See Boss for more.
