Steve Harris Compression
 

What kind of compressor could get me close to Steve Harris's tone? Backstory: Steve uses heavy compression and lightly brushes his (rather heavy) flatwound strings and gets a real clicky and bright tone. Please don't recommend crazy expensive stuff, please!

EDIT: Forgot to mention that my TCE BG250 comes in the mail tomorrow, could the spectracomp get close?

With that setup, don't expect a Harris tone out of the box. I would know, as I have the BG500 combo. The compressor is dynamic but not as dynamic as several thousand dollar tube studio compressors (as per Steve's setup).

Little of his tone is in his compression. It's mostly in his feathery touch and modified precision bass. The rest is a little amp grit, compression, and pushing 12s and 18s.

You could get a Harris-esque tone with treble up, mids flat (or a tad cut), bass flat, tube tone a tad, and tweeter tone up a bit.

Thanks for saving me a little money there.

You sir, must have not listened to any of his isolated tracks. The only compression you hear is done by the producer at 0:39-0:50 (of this song The Trooper) Im just using this song as an example. Listen to others....i dont hear light compression....never mind heavy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSYuse9o8KI

Mind you i haven't listened to EVERY one,,,,but ones i have...they all sound like this (to me)

Anyways IMHO...tone is achieved in the gear your using....way before recording. Compression is a process that intentionally reduces the dynamic range of audio signals. Google it.
Its a good read!



:bassist:

On 'where eagles dare' steve played a 4*12 Marshall closed cab with eminence speakers, just mic sound, thats adds a lot of compression.
hiwatt tube preamp, lots of compression.
DBX 160 compressor, compression.
Compressor added during the mixing and mastering.
the end, heavy compression.

The thing to remember is when high quality studio gear is used to do lots of compression, it doesn't necessarily need to sound very compressed at all if the driver knows whats he's doing.

This sounds very compressed to my ears. Maybe its the nature of youtube.

+1
That's the thing exactly: a good compressor, used properly, results in a very articulate "uncompressed" perception of the sound. Most people's ideas of what compression sounds like is from abuse, and from comps that are not very good.

Harris not only uses an old 160, he keeps a spare in the rack as backup--so I'm guessing he thinks it's an important part of his sound.

Just in case anyone wonders, the current and recent models of dbx 160 are a completely different circuit than the one Harris uses (commonly called the 160 "VU").

A set of groundwound or flatwound strings also helps. I can pull off a similar sound out of my P-bass which has grounds on it through my BG500-210. I'll try your settings later.

The Harris tone is from the heavy flatwound strings that are very high tension. The clicky aspect of the tone is from the action being set so low. The Harris tribute bass (I own one) has a big fat neck and a Badass 2 bridge to cope with the high tension strings.

If you aren't playing with flatwounds that are that low and 'stiff' you are going to struggle to get close to his tone.

I think compression is a bit of a red herring in all of this.

Yep that it. Add some sloppy technique to that and you are ready to rock

listen to this man he knows! thanks Bongomania for all your help in the past. rtslinger

Thank you

Wasn't even gonna go into the studio time I have put in to know what I'm talking about. I'm going to just leave it at that

Bongo's point is a good one. Harris' sound IMO doesnt have any "heavy" audible compression. So.....whatever

This might be a better example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U493_zUyoE

Anyone who tells you there is no audible compression going on there doesn't know what a 160 sounds like.

The 166 can get you in to the ball park for cheaper. If you are using one of the new ones with the attack/release knobs turn them off(set to auto). High ratio, set the the threshold so you can control the amount of 'smoosh' in the attack with your playing style.

Sound like a hard limiter set-up with about 10dB of dynamic range. Super compressed.