As the title says. I have absolutely no idea what is going on. Sorry for the weird number words - dang automod.... TLDR at the bottom.

I play a stock Epiphone ThreeThreeFive Dot into a Boss Katana MK2II. I've been playing this axe since roughly twenty ten or so and I've had the Katana since summer of twenty twenty three.

Our heat went out the few nights we just happenned to have what had to be record low temps. Super small apartment, so there was nothing I could do but throw some blankets over everything and put the guitar in the case and hope for the best.

After this cold, there is this nasty upper-mid-rangey kinda "breakup" going on. And everything just sounds DEAD. No amount of fiddling with peddle/amp EQ will remove this sudden blanket of "muddiness".

It also very much sounds like there is TOO much distortion happenning. Kinda like if someone had poked holes in the speaker of the amp or something like that.

I've checked and rechecked all my cables, I've moved every pedal all around, I've adjusted the pickup magnets and pickup height to see if that made any difference (it didn't). I've often wondered if my fifteen year old pickups are still good or "need" replacing (can anyone enlighten me on that?)

I cleaned the guitar and put brand new strings on a couple weeks ago (Elixirs). I only had time to play an hour or two in those few weeks. This guitar has been through rather extreme heat and cold before and I've never had that be an issue in the past (everything just sounds MUDDY, like "dead" strings do).

I'm at a total loss here. Unless it's just bad timing with something else, I have to assume the weather did SOMETHING. I mean the room got down probably into the low fifties if I had to guess.

Currently, I've spent the last four or five days fiddling for hours on end - NOTHING sounds right anymore.

And yes, I have factory reset the Katana, lol. Didn't make a difference. :)

You know when you have a perfect sound dialed in on your amp forever and you make the mistake of making some small adjustment and suddenly you can't get back your original sound no matter what? This scenario almost feels like this. At this point I've fucked around SO much trying to trouble shit this lousy sound that I fear I may have caused more harm......

TL;DR: Cold weather. Very "dead" sounding amp/guitar afterwards. Odd upper-mid-rangey breakup/distortion. Clean string recently put on. All cables seem fine. No clue what's up.