Maybe I’m late to the party, but I just picked one of these up.
Really a marvelous little piece, and my biggest problem is trying to decide which settings I like the most..
-an exceptionally useful range of attack and release times.
-dry blend is always a great feature, and it’s executed well here.. this does a great job at the ‘over compress it then blend in a lot of dry’ sound, but it REALLY shines when you blend in a *tiny* amount of clean to a wet sound that’s already very usable. you can really go between a chewy smooth compressed effect and a subtle fattened natural tone with just a little bit of clean blend.
-obviously the metering is out of this world. Not only is it very responsive, and not only does it give you as much visual feedback as you could possibly need, but the way you can see the effect of attack and release time visually represented in the meter.. it’s teaching me more about compression and helping me to hear it better and dive deeper into my ear’s relationship with my envelope.
- the input level, which adjusts your signal about a fixed threshold, is a useful enough range for me and my instruments on hand. The metering makes getting this right super easy, and you can really fine tune the response with a comfortable turn of the knob
- the tone + color circuit .. well both of them sound very very good. The harmonic coloration it adds is really really nice. But I have to be honest, it irks me a bit that in order to use the nice saturation color that you must also choose either a mid scoop or a bump at 2k. It’s honestly kind of forgivable since both of them sound so good.. the frequencies are well selected and the effect is very musical, but in principle it seems weird. I’ve had luck adjusting those frequencies back to normalish, but I’d rather still just have the nice color.
- the sidechain HPF, if you don’t know, removes some lows from the envelope detector circuit, which essentially makes the compressor less reactive to lows. This works very effectively, it really gives an open bottomless feel.. but here’s the thing.
This ALREADY SOUNDS SO DAMNED GOOD IN THE LOWS. Maybe it’s personal, but I’m always so annoyed by choked lows that a dry blend and/or sidechain HPF is necessary- but in this case the natural response of the comp to the lows is SO chewy and round and fat. It makes me never want to just the HPF again unless I just need to be unbridled and huge.. but if I’m riffing, my low end sounds better than ever, a series of fat sonic plums.
The only other factor that even approached a Con about this pedal is the relatively tame ratios- to me 2:1 is so low and subtle, my first reaction is that 4:1 8:1 and 16:1 or something would be a better range… but man, the 10:1 is a LOT of squish, 4:1 is really a perfect sweet compression, and I bet the 2:1 is the perfect subtle barely there compression that ANYONE could use
I’m tickled, Empress really knocked it out of the park, and managed to stand out in a field that is already bursting at the seams with impressive pedals these days.
Really a marvelous little piece, and my biggest problem is trying to decide which settings I like the most..
-an exceptionally useful range of attack and release times.
-dry blend is always a great feature, and it’s executed well here.. this does a great job at the ‘over compress it then blend in a lot of dry’ sound, but it REALLY shines when you blend in a *tiny* amount of clean to a wet sound that’s already very usable. you can really go between a chewy smooth compressed effect and a subtle fattened natural tone with just a little bit of clean blend.
-obviously the metering is out of this world. Not only is it very responsive, and not only does it give you as much visual feedback as you could possibly need, but the way you can see the effect of attack and release time visually represented in the meter.. it’s teaching me more about compression and helping me to hear it better and dive deeper into my ear’s relationship with my envelope.
- the input level, which adjusts your signal about a fixed threshold, is a useful enough range for me and my instruments on hand. The metering makes getting this right super easy, and you can really fine tune the response with a comfortable turn of the knob
- the tone + color circuit .. well both of them sound very very good. The harmonic coloration it adds is really really nice. But I have to be honest, it irks me a bit that in order to use the nice saturation color that you must also choose either a mid scoop or a bump at 2k. It’s honestly kind of forgivable since both of them sound so good.. the frequencies are well selected and the effect is very musical, but in principle it seems weird. I’ve had luck adjusting those frequencies back to normalish, but I’d rather still just have the nice color.
- the sidechain HPF, if you don’t know, removes some lows from the envelope detector circuit, which essentially makes the compressor less reactive to lows. This works very effectively, it really gives an open bottomless feel.. but here’s the thing.
This ALREADY SOUNDS SO DAMNED GOOD IN THE LOWS. Maybe it’s personal, but I’m always so annoyed by choked lows that a dry blend and/or sidechain HPF is necessary- but in this case the natural response of the comp to the lows is SO chewy and round and fat. It makes me never want to just the HPF again unless I just need to be unbridled and huge.. but if I’m riffing, my low end sounds better than ever, a series of fat sonic plums.
The only other factor that even approached a Con about this pedal is the relatively tame ratios- to me 2:1 is so low and subtle, my first reaction is that 4:1 8:1 and 16:1 or something would be a better range… but man, the 10:1 is a LOT of squish, 4:1 is really a perfect sweet compression, and I bet the 2:1 is the perfect subtle barely there compression that ANYONE could use
I’m tickled, Empress really knocked it out of the park, and managed to stand out in a field that is already bursting at the seams with impressive pedals these days.
