Sophie Burrell x Boss Katana Tone Crafting Masterclass at the Roland Denmark Street Store

So I attended Boss’s inaugural workshop / masterclass event at the Roland Store on Denmark Street. Hosted by Matt Knight, and featuring Guitarist / Creator / Social Media superstar Sophie Burrell - who just happens to be a major Boss Katana Ambassador for around 10 years now, where she featured very prominently in Boss’s recent Katana Gen 3 rollout.

 

I’ve been peripherally aware of her for several years now - while early on I used to occasionally confuse her for Sophie Lloyd! I do remember her participating in Andertons’ ’The Captain Meets’ series

Which started out really strong with a live jam, but then ended up being a somewhat ’dry’ interview. I recall Sophie with her wavy hair - soft curls even, while since then she’s massively sharpened up her image. And her current look of sort of badger-striped hair and heavy Egyptian style / Cat’s Eye makeup serves her very well. She’s immaculately turned out for every occasion - a lot of thought goes into her styling evidently!

She’s always been great at cultivating her own image / presence - and her current styling is really strong and iconic. In fact I had kind of lost touch with that phenomenon - but the Boss Masterclass event reaffirmed how charismatic and warmly engaging she is. She seems to be a total natural nowadays with a strong multi-layered stage persona and with several layers to her various activities, while she’s not as prolific as I once thought she was. She has a very strong following on both Instagram and YouTube in particular - with 701,000 and 798,000 subscribers respectively. On instagram those 701,000 followers are on the basis of just 56 posts, where my own number of 14,900 followers from 2,209 posts pales intro insignificance really. Her YouTube figures are from just 82 key uploads really. As for many mainly social media personalities - she relies on a number of different revenue streams - including Patreon, Guitar Tuition also, and a variety of subscription services.

 

For last night’s event Sophie was showing us how she goes about dialling in tones on her Gen 3 Katana Artist head - and the session was based on a lot of audience interaction which made for a lot of fun! - and the shaping of 4 key tones - where I well recall the Eddie Van Halen and Dimebag Darrel ones at the start and finish the best, but didn’t quite catch whom the other two were based on - I think it might have been Syntster Gates, and Sophie’s perennial favourite Mark Tremonti.

I have two things sort of in common with Sophie (three actually - same brand of strings too!) - in that we both favour Gen 3 Boss Katana Amps, and PRS Guitars - those are my mainstays too - while I use mine quite differently (part of a Stereo Clean Pedal Platform). Sophie is very much of the ’Plugins and Digital’ Generation - where there is always an umbilical cord connected to a laptop - from where she controls her amp via Boss’s Tone Studio and Tone Exchange Apps. She tends to select the nearest match preset and then tweak that to taste. We covered that process in detail through the masterclass session.

She favours a lot of compression in her tones, and a fair amount of low end - which is why I was unable to  guess that her first revealed tone was based on Eddie Van Halen’s Panama. For me too much compression delives a much denser and more leaden tonality - where you loose a lot of the open-pored springiness and bounce of some of those core tones. Of course we all ’interpret’ tones to our own preferences - which is something that Sophie excels at - she just likes a very compressed dense take on those tones - while I deploy a slightly lighter touch. Her tones of course still sound superb - and are always tight and fairly percussive and pounding - she is evidently very well ear-trained as such, and can quickly pick up the musical key / mode and melody pretty much instantly - from what she hears - as she so ably demonstrated on the night. She has such an easy way and effortless banter with the audience - it’s really a marvel to see such a great representation of talent and confidence.

Sophie has long harboured ambitions to be a Rockstar - and she certainly has the looks, charisma and talent to take her the whole way - while there’s always going to be a component of luck and happenstance. And none of her bands seems to have worked out yet - despite some really solid work. She mostly specialises in interpolated cover songs now - where she massively adapts those pieces to her own style, and loves to compose new variants of the solo sections in particular. She definitely has very strong skills in that area. As a Brand Strategist I’m always fascinated by a carefully cultivated persona - and her current incarnation is so strong and smartly deployed. With bands like The Warning and Nova Twins - we’re definitely in the era of the strong female lead guitarists and it seems to be a role Sophie was born for - she just needs a little more luck to finally get to that Rockstar status. She’s such a smart operator that I have every hope that she will make it there - she just needs a little more luck in certain areas. She has certainly amassed a very strong following - and when you have nearly a million followers - the sky’s the limit.

I very much enjoyed the session and look forward to attending more in the future - you will need to keep your eyes on the Roland Store Events Page !

Here follows a photo montage from the event - with brief descriptions, and including / interspersed with some Boss Archive images also in the middle section - from Sophie’s participation in the Katana Gen 3 launch - where she was very much the poster-child for that occasion.

I was a peripheral fan of Sophie before attending - while now I’m fully committed to the cause! - what a wonderful effervescent human being and prodigious talent, and props to my good friends Matt K and Mark in particular and Alana and her fantastic staff - all of those did a wonderful job on the night - including Matt B on the mixing console!