You should have never gotten rid of your FEA. I really think the Smoothie is a great pedal. It's fairly flexible and for the price point it really can't be beat. Though I too understand the GAS for a Cali.
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OVNIFX Smoothie Compressor
- Thread starter boomertech
- Start date
Yeah. It's a puzzle. It took me some time to figure it out. Each bass interacts a little different. More controls can handle more variables, but simplifying to fewer knobs is nice.
I had the FEA DE-CL and man it had a lot of knobs. Sounded great with everything at noon but I was out of my league I think. That's what intrigues me about a lot of these new compressors. They are simple and they sound great, Smoothie included!
I've been through quite a few compressor pedals trying to find my perfect compressor sound/tone, size, and voltage. The FEA DE-CL was the last comp. pedal I owned before the Smoothie, and the FEA Opti-FET before that one......out of all the comp. pedals I've had, the FEA Opti-FET would be close favorite behind the Smoothie.
bongomania
Commercial User
I have used a lot of comps, and I have not taken the smoothie out of my signal chain or touched any of the controls other than adjusting threshold for different basses since the day I got it. Doesn't do anything crazy, just does the important things right.
I ordered a smoothie last week. It arrived at my place a day and a half later, despite the snow storm that hit Portland. I got to use it at a gig Saturday.
So far I am incredibly impressed. I have gone through a bunch of compressors lately. This does exactly what I am looking for. I need to spend more time with it to really dial in the setting I am after. But, it made my sound nicer and smoother, which made me play better.
I can't thank Bongo enough for creating an awesome compressor, getting it in the mail so fast, and most importantly for giving us such an incredible reference and educational website.
So far I am incredibly impressed. I have gone through a bunch of compressors lately. This does exactly what I am looking for. I need to spend more time with it to really dial in the setting I am after. But, it made my sound nicer and smoother, which made me play better.
I can't thank Bongo enough for creating an awesome compressor, getting it in the mail so fast, and most importantly for giving us such an incredible reference and educational website.
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bongomania
Commercial User
I see the JK, but just in case, there are four feet (square, clear) included in the box, for you to adhere on if you want.
bongomania
Commercial User
No, I'm way too small time for that, and have no immediate plans to get bigger.
I see the JK, but just in case, there are four feet (square, clear) included in the box, for you to adhere on if you want.
Duh. Found them and am sheepishly attaching them now.
Got the Smoothie last week and I've spent about 5 hours with it since. There was a little shock at first, because I'm soooo used to the flavor of compression and tone from my FloorQ. Hard to describe why that is, other than, the FloorQ's baked in warmth and it being slightly more crisp. It's not that the Smoothie lacks these qualities, it just doesn't impart them in the same way. I love that the tone knob only affects the compression circuit. The Blend is killer and each level has a good bit of gain available. I found unity with either knob around 11. In the end, I'd happily say the Smoothie has a permanent place on my board.
I'm a little late to respond to this comment, but... I briefly owned both the Smoothie and the Compact Bass. They are very different to my ears and their merit is defined by what your compression goals are. Are you looking for a utility compressor to smooth out transient peaks with minimal tonal enhancements? Get the Smoothie. Are you looking for a tone enhancing circuit that just happens to provide compression? Get the Compact Bass.
Let me explain my feelings on this: The Smoothie does it's thing without really getting in the way of anything. It reminds me of the Empress compressor in that regard. Killer utility compression. I noticed that my midrange in the 450-600hz range sounded more pronounced when it was engaged, and I verified that on a scope. You can mitigate this with the tilt EQ, but it's worth mentioning that there is a slight tonal shift that occurs when using the Smoothie that I don't see discussed very often. Not a bad thing, just worth mentioning. Despite the fairly high number of controls it's an easy and intuitive pedal to dial in. I had a very usable tone in minutes after plugging in for the first time. There's honestly not a ton to say about this pedal since it does its job so simply and effectively. This is THE pedal if you want compression with minimal alternation to your tone outside of the midrange bump.
The Compact Bass on the other hand is a very different animal. Like the Smoothie's midrange bump, the CB has a bump, but it's higher. To my ears it's in the upper midrange, probably in the 1.5-3khz range. I've not scoped it to confirm my suspicion, but it's quite pronounced. I find the CB a lot harder to dial in than the Smoothie despite having the same number of knobs. It's much less intuitive, but not overly so. I had some preconceived notions about where I would be setting the controls before I got it that ended up not working well at all. Once I got out of my own way I found some very usable tones. The input gain control on the CB is really finicky. Go just a little too hot and suddenly you're into light overdrive territory. It's not as apparent as something like a Fairfield Accountant, but it can get pretty snarly if you push it. I find that for my needs I'll dial in a compression sound I like and then adjust the input gain to get the amount of action from the LED indicator that I want to see without any distortion artifacts and I'm good to go. Lately that's been everything at noon except the input gain control which gets adjusted to accommodate whichever bass I happen to be playing at the time. Pretty easy once you've dialed in your sound, but be prepared to do some work. The pedal adds a sheen, some noticeable fatness in the upper bass and lower midrange, and a general enhancement to your tone that I really enjoy. It can add some overdrive to the signal, for better or worse. I recently did some sessions for a pop meets jazz group and the light overdrive from the circuit really made the DI sound to the board come alive. This is THE pedal if you want tone enhancement and compression, but you can't deal with the odd power requirements, limited controls and fixed ratio of a Diamond BCP-1.
Ultimately I sold the Smoothie and kept the CB, but I could be happy with either.
I don't think that I have seen anyone say the Smoothie has a mid-bump. The FFT plots that Cyrus has on his spec page pretty much show a flat response un-compressed and compressed.
Green = Un-compressed
Blue = Compressed
He had to use a white noise generator so that he could capture the freq resp during compression, so that is why the plots are jagged. But, if you were to sweep the Smoothie w/o compression, I think it would be really smooth and flat from 10-20KHz.
-Frank
Green = Un-compressed
Blue = Compressed
He had to use a white noise generator so that he could capture the freq resp during compression, so that is why the plots are jagged. But, if you were to sweep the Smoothie w/o compression, I think it would be really smooth and flat from 10-20KHz.
-Frank
I don't think that I have seen anyone say the Smoothie has a mid-bump. The FFT plots that Cyrus has on his spec page pretty much show a flat response un-compressed and compressed.
Green = Un-compressed
Blue = Compressed
He had to use a white noise generator so that he could capture the freq resp during compression, so that is why the plots are jagged. But, if you were to sweep the Smoothie w/o compression, I think it would be really smooth and flat from 10-20KHz.
-Frank
I used an old analog noise generator that I've had kicking around my studio for a long time. It can toggle between various noise colors (white, pink, various weighted variants, etc.). It's a slick little box. The noise generated falls off or at least behaves oddly below 50hz and above 10khz. I disregard anything seen outside of those boundaries. Between those boundaries it looks remarkably similar to software generated noise when viewed on a scope. I'm not sure of it's output voltage, which is unfortunately fixed, but I can run it into an amplifier and get levels that are slightly lower than my EMG JVX loaded Jazz bass, which I would describe as a bass with moderate output (i.e. it's far from low output, but I wouldn't really call it high output like something loaded with SD Quarter Pound pickups or a super hot preamp). I do not know the output impedance of the noise generator. It could qualify as high-Z, low-Z, or somewhere in between. That may be a factor, but given how similarly it appears on a scope to a software generated noise signal I've never really worried about it. I would think an impedance mismatch would be more noticeable in the top end than the midrange.
Setup: I ran the noise generator into the input of my Smoothie, took the Smoothie's output into the front end of a Mackie Onyx Blackbird, sent the resultant signal into Logic Pro X and used a Blue Cat Audio spectrum analyzer to review the results through Logic's 'software monitoring' option which basically puts a monitoring point immediately downstream of the AD converter.
Using that setup I adjusted the blend pot to be 100% wet, set tone at noon, and adjusted the level such that the input signal was not triggering the compression circuit. At this point I could see the slight bump in the midrange I was hearing and have been describing here. As I adjusted the tone pot the overall display "shape" of the spectrum analyzer changed as you would expect from a tilt EQ (boost highs/cut lows, boost lows/cut highs). Adjusting the level to put it into the compression circuit the midrange bump got a little more pronounced, but not by much. I don't recall where I had the attack and sustain controls, but I suspect they were at noon or lower as that's typically where I found myself running it as I prefer the sound of subtle compression with a relatively slow attack. I don't recall where I had the threshold switch, but I know when using it on my pedalboard I greatly preferred it in the -20 position, so I would suspect that's where it was for this test as well.
It's entirely possible that mine wasn't working correctly, but given that everything else about the pedal behaved exactly per the manual that seems suspect. I wouldn't have even scoped it had my ears not told me right away that something was happening in the midrange. Again, I do not consider this a bad thing, more of a curiosity of the circuit that I experienced with my particular pedal. That bump would not be a deal-breaker had I not preferred the Compact Bass. It's worth mentioning that this was a new pedal that I bought directly from Bongo.
Agree. I briefly had an Empress and a Cali CB. I really like the sauce the CB adds. The only annoyance is that it sounds really great on a host of settings and I can't settle on one.
