Squishing Sound

Continuing along on my effects journey, I wanted to round out my guitar signal chain with a compressor, and I picked the Boss CP-1X to do the job.

A compressor at its most core level will track the envelope of a signal, its overall volume, and when it exceeds a certain level it will turn down the gain on the signal. This compresses the dynamic range into a smaller dB window, which intuitively seems like it should make it sound like the louder parts get toned down a little.

However, what really happens is that the louder parts no longer dominate the quieter sections, and so in effect the compressor pedal lifts those quieter parts up in (relative) volume. This makes it sound like sustained notes ring out much longer, which can be very helpful if you want something that sounds more smooth and less plucky (which I often do).

But of course it doesn't just make the note tails longer, because as soon as another note gets played the envelope follower triggers the compression circuit to drop the gain again, and so new notes can essentially mute old notes, making sure that the sound doesn't get muddied up with too much happening at once.

This kind of effect works really well at the start of the signal chain, and for right now I'm thinking that this will be a good setup.

The compressor sits at the start of the chain to shape the signal coming straight out of the guitar. This particular compressor also includes an expander function where at very low volumes the compression is reversed and the gain is reduced. This ensures that background noise doesn't get amplified up into annoyingly audible levels when nothing else is playing, which can be an issue with less sophisticated compression effects.

This then gets fed into the Boss OC-5 Octave pedal which I discussed recently. I can bring this in and out depending on whether I want to play some bass lines or just guitar stuff.

Next we have the start of the tone shaping effects with the Boss DC-2w Dimension C chorus pedal. This adds a lot of depth, space and motion to the sound. It can also add stereo width, but I'll likely be running it in mono into the final pedal on the board.

The Zoom MS-50G takes up the final spot, where it will be providing a Reverb <- Amp Sim <- Delay chain. The delay effect gives a sharp echo to the sound, which can help consecutive notes harmonize together. The amp sim effect basically colours the sound in the same way that a number of classic guitar and/or bass amps would. Finally the reverb adds a diffuse echo to open up the soundstage and give the impression that the guitar was recorded in a physical acoustic environment rather than sounding like the raw audio is being poured directly into your ears.

So that's the guitar side of things taken care of, but what about squishing the rest of my sound? Well, it just so happens that I came across a Boss RCL-10 from their Micro Rack series.

This one is set up a little differently from the CP-1X. Rather than having a compressor and expander that work simultaneously, it instead has an overall control that allows you to dial in compression if you turn it in one direction, or expansion if you turn it in the other. It then has a separate noise gate which sharply cuts off the input when the volume drops below a certain level.

In practice one can set up the RCL-10 to act very similarly to the CP-1X by dialling in the main circuit for the desired level of compression and then tuning the noise gate to cut off just before any background noise is picked up.

But that's not the only thing you can do with it. Since the noise gate is separately configurable, you can also do silly tricks like feeding a reverb into it.

This causes the compressor to drag out the reverb trail until it reaches the noise gate threshold, at which point it gets sharply cut off. This was very characteristic of a lot of 80s drum sounds, and once you hear it you'll realize you recognize it in a lot of songs of the era.

Now, did I buy this compressor for that purpose? No. Well, maybe a little bit. I actually bought it because it was a really cheap Micro Rack effect in good condition, and in particular it still had the button caps on the power, effect and, around back, the input gain selector switch.

And I wanted a good example to be able to model and 3d print some replacements for my reverb unit.

Which is, you know, another future project to add to the pile.