Compression pedal basic question

[Lesfunk]

I never Used a compressor for years and years but started using one in recent times as a way of knocking the peak down on my envelope filter.

I have a diamond, which is a pretty good one, and it’s pretty transparent. I must have become used to it because i just leave it on all the time now

 

[mike buzzetti]

I have an old MXR Dynacomp and I slam both controls 100% for slapping and it KILLS !! overdrive + sustain. Definately colors the sound but thats what those old ones do .

 

[scottfeldstein]

I am coming from commercial photography, to capture the most boring image ever just raise the lows to the middle and lower the highs to the middle, and boom, a photo with absolutely no life. Same with drums, no intonation, no life. (to be fair, Animal on the muppets, did make a career doing it.)

In bass guitars, I'm supposed to shell out money for a compressor to lower my highs and raise my lows? Is there a sentence missing from every website as to why you would want to kill the very thing that gives music life???

Or is the assumption that you always have a sound engineer in tow who boosts your bland clean tone?
If I don't have a sound engineer laying around, do I need a compressor pedal?

About a dozen years ago I decided I would built my first pedal board. I'd been playing for thirty years straight into the amp. One of the first things I got, based on what other players were doing, was an MXR M87 bass compressor. I set sensible settings, got the LED meters metering, and it was fine. But in truth after a while I started to wonder...was it really doing anything for me? I had this lingering doubt until one day I turned up at band rehearsal without my pedalboard.

We get a couple of songs in and I start to realize something is very wrong. I can't tell exactly what it is, but the feeling was like suddenly having all your clothes on backward. Then I began to realize what was going on. Some of the notes in my bass lines were honking out loudly over the whole group...while other notes were just gone, disappeared. I had no compressor. It had been leveling out the boomy notes so I could turn up loud enough for the quieter ones to be heard.

I'll never play without a compressor again. It is now a fundamental part of what I call "signal hygiene." (Along with my HPF.)

 

[eddododo]

I am coming from commercial photography, to capture the most boring image ever just raise the lows to the middle and lower the highs to the middle, and boom, a photo with absolutely no life. Same with drums, no intonation, no life. (to be fair, Animal on the muppets, did make a career doing it.)

In bass guitars, I'm supposed to shell out money for a compressor to lower my highs and raise my lows? Is there a sentence missing from every website as to why you would want to kill the very thing that gives music life???

Or is the assumption that you always have a sound engineer in tow who boosts your bland clean tone?
If I don't have a sound engineer laying around, do I need a compressor pedal?

it’s more of a ‘feel’ thing.

with stringed instruments you’re stuck with only one kind of attack envelope (ie the shape of the volume from the initial attack through the rounding out into the decay of the note). One of the more ‘fun’ uses of a compressor is to give you an opportunity to effect that envelope. You can use it to emphasize the fat front of a note, you can use it to ameliorate the decay of the note, you can use it to make the middle and ends of a note as fat as the initial attack… all kinds of things, most of which are better learned through feeling them in person.
Notably, compression can really do wonders for extended techniques like slapping and tapping, as well as making chords and harmonics more present.


you can of course do some ‘clinical’ compression, keeping peaks from being too high, setting a little extra sustain, but honestly these things are, surprisingly, more subtle uses and kind of hard to get right for a noobie.. if peak limiting is done right then you basically shouldn’t notice it, for example.

 

[jschulman]

Compression is probably the most misunderstood, yet most consistently used effect in music. Play any rock album going back 70 years and you're more than likely to hear compression, whether from a console, a tube amp, tape, a pedal, or an outboard unit like a Fairchild 660.

The most common definition of compression is something along the lines of: "it makes loud sounds quieter and quieter sounds louder." This is really only half true. Compression does make all sound above a specific threshold quieter, but makeup gain is what brings the entire compressed signal up. Many musicians use their compressors as limiters - in other words, they put them at the end of their signal chains in order to prevent their volume from spiking when using other effects (like fuzzes or octaves) and overwhelming other band members or damaging their speakers. This isn't really the use I'm talking about here - my interest is more in using a compressor to shape tone.

To really understand compression you have to learn how to hear it. It's a subtle effect. Think about each individual plucked note as two separate pieces - the transient and the sustain. The transient is that loud, clicky, brief moment when your finger, or your pick, strikes the string. (I'd recommend trying this out with a pick, since a picked transient is far more dramatic.) The sustain is the quieter, steadier ringing out of the note as the string gradually stops vibrating.

The attack of a compressor acts in milliseconds, so when you play through one, what you're doing is shaping the transient every time you strike a string. When your signal crosses the threshold, a fast attack will squash the transient almost immediately, while a slow attack will let some of it through before ramping up the gain reduction to whatever ratio you set. Once your signal drops below the threshold, the release is the speed at which the compressor "lets go".

When you're playing through an amp, especially one with little headroom, the preamp might distort at your transients - that distortion is compression. When you record to tape, think about your loudness as equivalent to the physical width of the waveform being printed to the tape - if those peaks reach beyond the edges of the tape, those edges will flatten your signal, and that flattening will manifest as distortion (or "saturation"). Since you can't physically get any louder, that distortion is compression. Too much volume and your waveform will be a long, distorted rectangle the exact width of the tape.

I'm sharing two of my favorite compressed bass tones below as references. Herbie Flowers possibly played on both but the truth of that is lost to time. I think the Walker track is a picked Burns Bison with flats - the Gainsbourg track might be the same. The compression might come from the amp, or the console, or something else. Listen to the richness of the pick attack, the saturation of each note, and the blending of the transient release into the sustain. Then try and figure out how you can match that tone, or the tone of another reference, by using whatever gear it is you have.

 

[ColdEye]

In photography terms think of it as dodge and burn and or post processing.

 

[Dominic D]

I go for a more subtle approach to compression. I like it when I can barely tell it’s on, but I immediately miss it when I turn it off.

 

[mike buzzetti]

Best compressors I had were UREI 1176Ln's pair ! they are rack monut and not a Live comp. but.

 

[Wasnex]

I am coming from commercial photography, to capture the most boring image ever just raise the lows to the middle and lower the highs to the middle, and boom, a photo with absolutely no life. Same with drums, no intonation, no life. (to be fair, Animal on the muppets, did make a career doing it.)

In bass guitars, I'm supposed to shell out money for a compressor to lower my highs and raise my lows? Is there a sentence missing from every website as to why you would want to kill the very thing that gives music life???

Or is the assumption that you always have a sound engineer in tow who boosts your bland clean tone?
If I don't have a sound engineer laying around, do I need a compressor pedal?

Your overcomplicating it. You need a compressor if you want it. If you don't want it, you don't need it.

Here's another nugget for you. Your signal should be processed separately for location and intended use. One location is on stage for your personal monitoring. The other location is out in the house for the audience's listening pleasure.

The acoustics on stage can vary significantly from the acoustics out in the house. Just because the sound is really good in one location does not guarantee that is it good somewhere else. Also you may key off of a certain type of tone or feel, which relates to both frequency response and how the signal compresses and responds to your touch. But the sound you like may cut through the house mix too much or it may get totally lost.

I personally do not generally use compression on stage because I want my bass to cut through the mayhem on stage. Light compression can sound great when I am playing by myself, but the loss of dynamic range tends to make it easier for my sound to get lost on stage. Most bass rigs have more than enough compression for my tastes in a live setting.

As an audio tech, I think compression can be really useful for slotting the bass into the mix.

For the record I typically perform in situations where my amp serves primarily as my personal monitor. The PA is used to deliver my sound to the audience, and if another musician on stage wants more or less bass, they talk to the audio tech about their monitor mix.

On gigs where my rig is expected to push the room, rather than running through the PA, my priorities change. It's not unusual for someone out in the house to call out desired changes to my sound. Frequently the changes they ask for degrade my experience on stage somewhat. But IMHO if you are going to be a pro, the priority should be providing a good experience for the audience.

There can be different expectations with photography. Sometimes the goal is to capture the most accurate/life-like image possible. Sometimes you use composition and skill to intentionally distort various aspects of an image in pursuit of artistic goals. I suggest you think of the compressor as a tool that can be used in pursuit of artistic goal.

 

[DaveParker39]

I am coming from commercial photography, to capture the most boring image ever just raise the lows to the middle and lower the highs to the middle, and boom, a photo with absolutely no life. Same with drums, no intonation, no life. (to be fair, Animal on the muppets, did make a career doing it.)

In bass guitars, I'm supposed to shell out money for a compressor to lower my highs and raise my lows? Is there a sentence missing from every website as to why you would want to kill the very thing that gives music life???

Or is the assumption that you always have a sound engineer in tow who boosts your bland clean tone?
If I don't have a sound engineer laying around, do I need a compressor pedal?

For me, the purpose of compression isn't so much about highs and lows. It's about a consistent signal hitting my amp. If I am not using a compressor and I go to slap the one note I slap every night someone is going to get a brain injury with the volume I play at. I need to be able to dig in and play aggressively and have something between my bass and amp attenuating that. I also lay back and the compressor helps make sure I don't drop out completely.

 

[nnnnnn]

to capture the most boring image ever just raise the lows to the middle and lower the highs to the middle, and boom, a photo with absolutely no life.

You make it sound like lows and highs are being raised and lowered (respectively) to a midpoint where they are pretty much equal to each other, but why would anyone ever do that (in normal circumstances)? That is not how people (normally) use compression.

It's not just a choice between the two extremes of zero compression and zero dynamics. Doesn't the idea of applying some shaping to the highs in some circumstances seem reasonable?

 

[nnnnnn]

Same with drums, no intonation, no life. (to be fair, Animal on the muppets, did make a career doing it.)

I think you mean dynamics, not intonation. But anyway, Animal could play with dynamics when he wanted to.

 

[JeezyMcNuggles]

I am coming from commercial photography, to capture the most boring image ever just raise the lows to the middle and lower the highs to the middle, and boom, a photo with absolutely no life. Same with drums, no intonation, no life. (to be fair, Animal on the muppets, did make a career doing it.)

In bass guitars, I'm supposed to shell out money for a compressor to lower my highs and raise my lows? Is there a sentence missing from every website as to why you would want to kill the very thing that gives music life???

Or is the assumption that you always have a sound engineer in tow who boosts your bland clean tone?
If I don't have a sound engineer laying around, do I need a compressor pedal?

That's not what it's for. It's make your playing more consistent.

To control your attack, level, and sustain.

 

[scottfeldstein]

A further thought. As a former photographer, I think the better analogy for bringing the blacks up and the highlights down is if you picked up a bass and played it through an amp with the Bass and Treble knobs turned down to 9 o'clock. It would sound like garbage. You don't do that with your bass signal and you don't do it with your photos. It has nothing to do with compression which is basically automatic volume control, not EQ.

 

[DrummerwStrings]

I had always heard that Animal was modeled on Kieth Moon... hhmmm...

w some Gene Krupa.

 

[Nashrakh]

If it hasn't been made explicit enough, you don't have to use compression if you find it doesn't align with your vision of what you'd want to sound like.

It's a tool in a toolbox. But just because you have it in your toolbox doesn't mean you have to use it whenever possible. You wouldn't use a saw to hang a picture, would you?

 

[Ewo]

My .02, as an always-on user of a compressor pedal for live work:

The compressor just restricts the dynamic range of the signal from your bass. I play fingerstyle and slap; it adds a bit of meat to the plucks and thumps, and reins in the spikes of the pops. I absolutely don't want the compressor to rob the dynamics of my touch on the strings--vital in live performance, IMHO--so I set the attack fairly slow and the release fairly quick, and keep the ratio around 4:1. I'll also run about a 50/50 blend, more or less.

Used that way, the compressor puts a bit of studio polish on my live sound. My advice is to avoid the simplified compressors,* and get one that gives you the full set of compression parameters (attack, decay, threshold, and ratio) and a wet/dry blend, if your goal is to sound natural and still retain your dynamics. A built-in sidechain HPF is a big plus, as that keeps the low register notes from triggering too much gain reduction.

I've been through a _lot_ of boxes...and FWIW the Empress Bass Comp and Broughton Omnicomp are my faves.

* I get it, that the simplicity of those might have some appeal--but IME it's worth spending the learning curve time to understand what the compression parameters do to the sound and buying a pedal that lets you dial them in just the way you like it.

 

[SteveCS]

Interesting. So the compression is aimed within each note, not high and low range of notes.
I have some thinking to do.

Yes - it's about the dynamics and envelope of each note, not pitch, timbre or tone (well maybe a little of the last one).

 

[Btbp]

Compression is probably the most misunderstood, yet most consistently used effect in music. Play any rock album going back 70 years and you're more than likely to hear compression, whether from a console, a tube amp, tape, a pedal, or an outboard unit like a Fairchild 660.

The most common definition of compression is something along the lines of: "it makes loud sounds quieter and quieter sounds louder." This is really only half true. Compression does make all sound above a specific threshold quieter, but makeup gain is what brings the entire compressed signal up. Many musicians use their compressors as limiters - in other words, they put them at the end of their signal chains in order to prevent their volume from spiking when using other effects (like fuzzes or octaves) and overwhelming other band members or damaging their speakers. This isn't really the use I'm talking about here - my interest is more in using a compressor to shape tone.

To really understand compression you have to learn how to hear it. It's a subtle effect. Think about each individual plucked note as two separate pieces - the transient and the sustain. The transient is that loud, clicky, brief moment when your finger, or your pick, strikes the string. (I'd recommend trying this out with a pick, since a picked transient is far more dramatic.) The sustain is the quieter, steadier ringing out of the note as the string gradually stops vibrating.

The attack of a compressor acts in milliseconds, so when you play through one, what you're doing is shaping the transient every time you strike a string. When your signal crosses the threshold, a fast attack will squash the transient almost immediately, while a slow attack will let some of it through before ramping up the gain reduction to whatever ratio you set. Once your signal drops below the threshold, the release is the speed at which the compressor "lets go".

When you're playing through an amp, especially one with little headroom, the preamp might distort at your transients - that distortion is compression. When you record to tape, think about your loudness as equivalent to the physical width of the waveform being printed to the tape - if those peaks reach beyond the edges of the tape, those edges will flatten your signal, and that flattening will manifest as distortion (or "saturation"). Since you can't physically get any louder, that distortion is compression. Too much volume and your waveform will be a long, distorted rectangle the exact width of the tape.

I'm sharing two of my favorite compressed bass tones below as references. Herbie Flowers possibly played on both but the truth of that is lost to time. I think the Walker track is a picked Burns Bison with flats - the Gainsbourg track might be the same. The compression might come from the amp, or the console, or something else. Listen to the richness of the pick attack, the saturation of each note, and the blending of the transient release into the sustain. Then try and figure out how you can match that tone, or the tone of another reference, by using whatever gear it is you have.

Man, where did you find this stuff?

Never heard them or of them, very interesting, makes me want more like it.

 

[jdjk7]

I am coming from commercial photography, to capture the most boring image ever just raise the lows to the middle and lower the highs to the middle, and boom, a photo with absolutely no life. Same with drums, no intonation, no life. (to be fair, Animal on the muppets, did make a career doing it.)

In bass guitars, I'm supposed to shell out money for a compressor to lower my highs and raise my lows? Is there a sentence missing from every website as to why you would want to kill the very thing that gives music life???

Or is the assumption that you always have a sound engineer in tow who boosts your bland clean tone?
If I don't have a sound engineer laying around, do I need a compressor pedal?

All of the music that you grew up listening to has compression. In fact, tracks without compression tend to sound off-- some things are too loud while other things are too quiet.

In the case of bass guitar, compression accomplishes two things-- it makes it so that all of your notes will be of relatively similar volume (which is great for most types of music) as well as making it so that no harmonic component of your sound will be much louder than the other-- which is great. If you have ever heard a bass tone in a track and been able to pick out the lows, mids, and highs evenly, even though it's not the only instrument in the mix, it's because of compression.

Compression is also key to other elements of "good" bass guitar tone. Overdrive, distortion, and fuzz all act the same as compression. Compression is also a key to achieving 'tube' tone.