forgive me for reviving an old thread here, but i thought this was an appropriate place for this particular question.
does anyone have a compressor they like for both bass AND guitar? particularly for punchier, brighter bass and for heavily distorted guitar. I’m currently running an MXR 87 bass comp on my bass rig, and I can’t say i’ve ever noticed it doing much aside from sweeping some poor technique under the rug. I’ve been looking to upgrade/try something new, and was curious if anyone recommended a compressor that was versatile enough for a bass or a guitar rig, or if I’m sincerely better off with separate compressors for each.
strictly speaking for bass, i’ve been leaning toward the keeley or the cali76, if that’s useful info.
The MXR M87 Bass Compressor and the MXR M76 Studio Compressor are
exactly the same pedal internally; the only difference is that they painted the enclosure black and took "bass" out of the name so guitar players would buy it. So, you already have one really good option for a compressor that works well on either guitar or bass.
The real trick to setting up any compressor as an "effect" is to understand what the settings do, and play with them to achieve the compression behavior you're after. Fewer controls can make it easier to dial in a specific "effect" of compression, because the pedal's circuit makes the assumption that you want that effect and changes the "full" set of compression variables to achieve the right amount of it at any setting on the knob. By the same token, however, a pedal that does one style of compression very well can be impossible to get a different sound from for a different genre, because that style uses different assumptions about the relationship of the full control set that's being simplified.
I admit my main use of the M87 is to even out dynamics in a group setting, and it is good at that. However, you can also get slap bass or chicken-pickin'/country compression out of the same pedal quite easily, you just need to play with attack and release settings and higher ratios to get that vise-grip clampdown with the right amount of initial attack for the style. For CP, you want the attack knob hard counter-clock for the shortest possible attack; for slap, play around in the 12-3 sweep. Release for both settings should be rather fast (clockwise on the dial); for slap you need the compressor to get out of the way of the next attack quickly, while for CP the goal is basically a ruler flat signal level, so a faster release lets the compression off faster as the input signal decays to keep the volume up.
Another good general-purpose compressor, if you have the money, is the Keeley Compressor Pro. It's a rack compressor/limiter in pedal form; full control set, including a soft-knee setting to hide the onset of compression a little better, and if you don't want to mess with it so much there's an auto-attack/release option as well (among other things you can have a specific setting for slap, then revert to general level control with "auto" A/R). Biggest downsides compared to the MXR are size ("double-wide" footprint on the board) and cost ($299 retail, compared to $189 for the MXRs).
