I’ve had the Boss Waza Air headphones for a good few years now, but I’ve only ever been using them sparingly, with sessions quite widely spaced. Now I’m using them multiple times a week, and I need some help.
In terms of playing through headphones they’re definitely a cut above any plugging-headphones-into-an-amp I’ve done in the past, not suffering as much from the “tiny speakers next to your ear” feeling. They’re not going to compare to moving a ton of air with an actual amp, but still, not terrible in terms of the actual headphone performance. The problem is the built in tones, and the amount of fiddling required to improve them (more than I’m willing to do). I’ve never been satisfied with what they provide, nor anything I’ve created, and I haven’t looked into any tips/downloadable tones for years now. I did download a set of tones from Juca Nery a few years ago, but wasn’t particularly satisfied with them and haven’t looked any further since then.
I was wondering if anyone here has any advice, maybe on how to tweak the tones in the Boss Tone Studio app, or (even better for a lazy $%!# like me) a place to download any pre-sets? I did a quick forum search for the Waza Airs and saw Troy commenting on a post from (I think) 2020, saying that he’s never been satisfied with the high gain tones he was getting from his Katana Air. Is that a problem they’ve still not managed to fix with the Katana line (and therefore presumably Waza Airs) 5 years later? Even though they can issue firmware updates and people much smarter than me can create their own tone settings that can then be downloaded?
The main priority would be finding a way to get some good high gain tones, but I’d also love to have a gradient starting from clean and heading through crunchy before getting to the high gain stuff. Any attempts I’ve made at creating my own clean or crunch sounds have always sounded unbearably thin… I’d also love to be able to get any amount of sustain! I know nothing about FX, and until reading Troy’s comments on that ancient post I didn’t realise they were using compressors/noise gates to compensate for a ton of noise that the high-gain ‘pedals’ created, and by doing so were killing any sustain. Not great, Boss!
Do any of you use the Waza Airs? Do you have the same issues? Have you fixed them? Keen to hear any thoughts and ideas…