COMPing

Everyone gets older, I think I'm realizing this a little later than many people out there. OK maybe it's a perceived realization. Whatever. More importantly, the older I get, the more difficult it is to appease my tone ideals. All this while, I've been working on the notion that saturation is best served with a pinch of drive. Naturally, cascading drive ad nauseam seems to work for me but let's face it, there's more to drive saturation than adding more of the obvious. Going the compressor way is one of them.

Compression, in a layman's nutshell, is the taming of protrusive peaks while beefing up the limp other end. It's putting a stop to whatever excess in your signal which are clearly not useful (like they say, too much of something is bad) & pumping up those which are necessary but not served adequately. This is the reason why you hear the leveling of peaks & thickening of bottom end, so the end product, more often than not, is a smoothing & thickening effect. This is what I hear lately & liking not because it's something revolutionary- it's been there all this while- it's a different approach to what I prefer & it works for me.

So the MXR Super Comp you see here is what I bought recently & I'm applying it in the following context:

1. Adding it to a mild drive/ distortion pedal
2. Adding it to an intense drive/ distortion pedal with the gain not at maximum
3. Adding it to an amp's drive channel at reduced gain/ maximum gain setting

More to this after a more comprehensive application :-)