This is a great response to a great post!
Anyway, yeah, it makes the bass seem fatter. I don't remember which compressor model I used on the Zoom.
My son has a compressor in his guitar setup -- I should give that one a try, see if it's much better than the Zoom. A dedicated one does seem like overkill for playing with friends. When I have done a show, it was just with a guitar player and a couple of singers, so a fat, in your face bass sound is probably the wrong sound anyway.
It's weird to start getting talked out of buying gear on this site, TBH...
Yeah, you somehow got responses only from the most level-headed TB members instead of the gear-hounds!
I have a background in production & engineering, and my hot-take is if people don't fully understand exactly what a compressor does and how it works, and WHY their tone might need one, they don't need one. Not that i'm the authority on what pedals people should or shouldn't use, but i've played without a compressor (other than one built into certain amps i've owned) for 30 years. On the other side, i do use compressors on the back end, in my DAW when i produce and mix, ALL THE TIME. It's a vital tool for me when i produce & engineer, but not
necessary for playing, especially just playing with friends. A lot of what a compressor does can be mostly fixed by better technique, and then the compressor could be just the kiss on top, or not used at all.
It's really easy to take the life out of your bass if you don't set up the compressor properly.
Here's a
link to my easy-ish to understand explanation of what a compressor actually does.
This post goes a little deeper into compressors. And
this post goes deeper still. But i try to keep things as simple and understandable as possible.
The thing with compressors is, they do different things depending on how you set them up. You can make your bass punchier, or squash all the punch and attack out of your playing. You can make it more punchy and tight, or less punchy and more sustained. You can use it to slightly beef up the sound, or overdo it and take the life out of the sound. You can even out the levels of your playing, or completely remove all dynamics completely. Or you can use it as protection against too much clipping.
All this is a long way of saying, if you have a compressor preset on your Zoom and it sounds good while you play with your friends, you don't need another compressor, especially one you need to spend time dialing in and figuring out how to sound good. If your pedal allows you to tweak the settings of the onboard compressor, you can play with that and start hearing how the different parameters affect your tone and affect how the other parameters react to your playing.
And at the same time, just because you don't need one, it doesn't mean you shouldn't buy a decent standalone compressor and start how to use it and how to properly "hear" compression. In most cases if you can hear the compression, you've used too much compression. The trick is to learn how to hear the effect of the compressor on the tone without hearing the compression. (Of course there's always exceptions where really aggressive compression is accepted or even needed. Think Nine Inch Nails or Primus, or certain things in the realm of metal, or certain slap styles.)
Final note: There's a million YouTube videos explaining how a compressor works and how to use them, but 9 hundred thousand of them have really bad or misleading info, and sometimes downright wrong info. So really choose your source carefully.
