Compression Pedals

[jmkratt]

Any of you guys use compression pedals for your guitar? Looking into purchasing one and would love any thoughts. Thanks!

[Dancing Ants]

ok.

i'll be honest here.

i played a good amount of compressors before buying the one i have.

the Boss Compressor is useless.
the DynaComp by MXR is ok.
the Keely i haven't used, but it looks/sounds nice from what i hear.
I bought an Analogman CompROSSor. It's great. pretty much makes everything sound great, and really brings out those quiet notes and makes a heavy overdrive or distortion come under control.

if you have any questions, i'd be glad to answer some.

[jmkratt]

Good to know, thanks for the input. Out of curiousity, do you find BOSS pedals to be inferior in general? They seem to be getting a lot of heat lately from people I have talked to.

EDIT: And are Analogman pedals modified versions of other pedals? I don't know much about them really.

[Footestompgp1]

whats a compression pedal do?

[jmkratt]

whats a compression pedal do?

http://users.chariot.net.au/~gmarts/fx-desc.htm#Cmp

"Compressors are commonly used in recording to control the level, by making loud passages quieter, and quiet passages louder. This is useful in allowing a vocalist to sing quiet and loud for different emphasis, and always be heard clearly in the mix.

Compression is generally applied to guitar to give clean sustain, where the start of a note is "squashed" with the gain automatically increased as the not fades away. Compressors take a short time to react to a picked note, and it can be difficult to find settings that react quickly enough to the volume change without killing the natural attack sound of your guitar."

Quick definition...

[DMBand520]

ok.

i'll be honest here.

i played a good amount of compressors before buying the one i have.

the Boss Compressor is useless.
the DynaComp by MXR is ok.
the Keely i haven't used, but it looks/sounds nice from what i hear.
I bought an Analogman CompROSSor. It's great. pretty much makes everything sound great, and really brings out those quiet notes and makes a heavy overdrive or distortion come under control.

if you have any questions, i'd be glad to answer some.

Have you used the Analogman pedal with a mic for vocals before? If so how well does it work?

[Dancing Ants]

never used a compressor with a mic.

as for boss pedals, i love their expression pedals (delay, flanger, auto wah, tremolo, etc) and i think their overdrive pedal is nice too.

here's some info straight from analogman.

http://www.analogman.com/rossmod.htm

these are based on the old Ross compressor that was discontinued. They're a bit expensive, but I've found them to be worth it, for sure.

[Dancing Ants]

Compression is generally applied to guitar to give clean sustain, where the start of a note is "squashed" with the gain automatically increased as the not fades away. Compressors take a short time to react to a picked note, and it can be difficult to find settings that react quickly enough to the volume change without killing the natural attack sound of your guitar."

the comprossor is prettty quick, i'd say. the newer batch allows you to set the attack for however you want it, which is a nice feature. the pedal overwhelmed me when i first got it though. it makes everything louder at first, till you learn to use it correctly.

[DMBand520]

the comprossor is prettty quick, i'd say. the newer batch allows you to set the attack for however you want it, which is a nice feature. the pedal overwhelmed me when i first got it though. it makes everything louder at first, till you learn to use it correctly.

I would guess you wouldn't really need a high attack for vocals since the quiet parts of a song and the loud parts are usually kinda seperated so it should have plenty of time to react. I'm trying to find a better way to record something like this song (http://iqmz.com/shared/Daydream%20In%20Red%20-%2002%20-%20Beautiful%20Dancer.mp3) where there are lots of lower parts and high parts. I had to record the vocals seperately for the low parts and high parts and then mess with all the levels in Cool Edit to get it to sound half decent. It's hard to tell from the recording but when my friend does the song live he is REALLY loud on the high parts and he's pretty quiet on the low parts so it was a bitch to record it.