So I put the DE-CL to a test here. We are recording first tracks to a record we are making at my home studio. First recording in that new place with a lot of new gear, so its fun project. I get to play all th basses I have, so testing includes fretted and fretless bass guitar, and DB pizzicato and bowed.
So far I've played one song with fretted and one with fretless bass. I also made some preliminary mixing of the tracks. I've got drums, bass, guitar, some keyboards and vocals.
Mixing bass with the other instruments just got a lot easier. Its actually the first pedal compressor I've tried that is good enough for studio. The fretted bass got a really nice and punchy sound, I used limiter with that one. With only minimal EQ tweaking, I was able to get the kick drum, and bass really locking and at the same time both is easy to hear. It also helped te guitar / bass axis. The warmth is really nice feature too. I used to add some saturation plugin to bass track, but the warmth does the same thing, only its better! I keep the warmth fairly high all the time, even when I am slapping. It really helps to bring character to the sound and to cut it trough the mix.
With fretless I stepped the limiter off, and backed a little warmth off too. Got a little slower start to the notes, and its more fretlesly so to speak.
The compressor alone did a lot of the same that the comp/limitter did to the fretted bass. Easier mixing, better sound overall. The best comment I got was from my fiancee, she is playing keyboards in the project. She normally kind a hates fretless, but this time she suddenly said that "that bass is really good, It sounds so much better than normal fretless basses" Naturally I took the credit to myself, of course it was my DIY fretless bass that is "so good".
I also opened the box as I said, and it looks sooooo clean inside. Actually either macine soldered, or soldering wizard did it.
the battery compartment is wicked cool. On the other hand it makes further quality inspection impossible. (I actually dis some soldering and quality inspections for Nokia sub coantractor maybe 20 years or so ago, and I kind a remember something about it still.) All in all, I could not be happier with it. I still need to play with it some more, now I just started using it in a context right away I got it out of the box. And I only did some little testing with the DB, we are probably recording one of the DB songs next weekend, so I'll know a lot more about that side after that. But I can already say that I simply love my DE-CL, and I dont want to play whitout it at all.
So thank you Frank and the team! Awesome compressor! Simply awesome!
