The BEST bass compressor

[pedalgrinder]

hahahaha where are you using your fingers thought 

[Earthscum]

earthscum lets get this clear i don't care what you dribble who you know what you do or how you go about it your pathetic. You don't bother me your just an annoyance that talks crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's get THIS straight. I have contributed a ton more than you have to this forum. As far as anyone here can tell, you don't even own a soldering iron. All I did was made it clear why people are having issues with you and making you feel like the "bad guy". Your reply correctly reflects your attitude problem, as I'm sure the reply to this as well.

I'm not dealing with it anymore. Your parents should take away your internet privileges, but since they won't, I guess I will contribute no more to these forums. Goodbye.

Y'all got my email, keep in touch.

[DavenPaget]

earthscum lets get this clear i don't care what you dribble who you know what you do or how you go about it your pathetic. You don't bother me your just an annoyance that talks crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Let's get THIS straight. I have contributed a ton more than you have to this forum. As far as anyone here can tell, you don't even own a soldering iron. All I did was made it clear why people are having issues with you and making you feel like the "bad guy". Your reply correctly reflects your attitude problem, as I'm sure the reply to this as well.

I'm not dealing with it anymore. Your parents should take away your internet privileges, but since they won't, I guess I will contribute no more to these forums. Goodbye.

Y'all got my email, keep in touch.

Oh sure i will , Dave . 

[pedalgrinder]

thats about the best thing i've heard if you actual look on the forbidden forum i have contributed more than most i can't on this one as the rules don't let me post it. But that the rules and thats fair enough but thank god the peanut is gone he just wanted to be god over shit. Good ridence earthscum!

[pedalgrinder]

The more i think about it the more it makes me laugh when i purchased my own internet connection about 15 years ago. I might go and ring my mum and dad and say take my internet connection. Hahahahahaha

[deadastronaut]

@pedalgrinder: this to me is quite a friendly forum, with no abuse,or even arguments..

differences of opinion occur, sure..but ive never seen anyone result to personal abuse etc ...its just not the way we do it on diysb...

david's been on here since well before i was, and i for one appreciate all ideas and suggestions from all members including him......after all none of us know everything right?..

its just a shame when people don't know when to just 'ease' off, and accept differences of opnion without resorting to 'getting interesting threads closed' or 'abuse'...

its kinda childish, and not in the spirit of what diysb is all about imo.......come on.....its not faecesbook..

[gritz]

@pedalgrinder: this to me is quite a friendly forum, with no abuse,or even arguments..

differences of opinion occur, sure..but ive never seen anyone result to personal abuse etc ...its just not the way we do it on diysb...

david's been on here since well before i was, and i for one appreciate all ideas and suggestions from all members including him......after all none of us know everything right?..

its just a shame when people don't know when to just 'ease' off, and accept differences of opnion without resorting to 'getting interesting threads closed' or 'abuse'...

its kinda childish, and not in the spirit of what diysb is all about imo.......come on.....its not faecesbook..

+1

I'm new here and I have to say that the place has a very friendly vibe. It would be a shame if a tiny (and noisy) minority got threads deleted and put off the helpful, knowledgeable folks from stopping by.

Arguments about the merits of compression should really be left to the folks on Gearslutz imo!

[pedalgrinder]

Ok, so you've contributed nothing to the other site, either. Less than 300 posts, you've been registered since Aug 2011. Heck, my registration is even 2 years older than that there.


below is earthscum's private message to me. He seems to think he is god and as you can all see here it is for you to view


EARTHSCUM's private msg to me.
I'm done with the pissing contest. You have not even shown that you can DIY, own a solder iron, or any of the likes. Put up or shut up. I want to see some kind of project from you this weekend, otherwise I guess I could assume you are just trolling the DIY sites. I noticed you've made a couple enemies over there as well.

Simple. Contribute more than your "Opinion" to these boards, or just go away. I will extend that same thing to the "other" forum, if needed.

Good day!

[Projectile]

ok if it's so personal why does practically every recording majoritly have compression on the bass....

A whole thread in itself there....  

A big part of it is the "volume wars" in modern music.  Compression allows more average volume = louder mix.  Bass frequencies in particular take up a lot of overall amplitude, so compressing the bass can really help increase overall volume.  Listen to the Rush album Vapor Trails for an example of the awful sound of too much compression/limiting/clipping.  Or recent stuff from Metallica.....

This is not true. Most producers were using a hefty amount of compression on bass guitar long before the volume wars ever got started. The over-compression of today's music is a separate issue. Pedalgrinder's comment could apply to almost every album featuring electric bass guitar since the late 60s. The fact is, when you go into a studio to record bass guitar, they will use a compressor on the track. It has been an essential part of the sound of bass guitar recordings for decades.

I'm not saying that you need compression for bass to sound good. I disagree with Pedalgrinder's statement that a compressor is a necessity, but let's not deny the fact that compression has been part of "the sound" of the instrument heard in the overwhelming majority of recorded music for a long time.

You can't really compare a stompbox compressor to a studio compressor-they work differently and are used for different things. For example, lots of country players slap a high compression level stompbox compressor infront of their amp, pair it with a tele and get that 'chicken pickin' sound.

Studio compressors are used totally differently. The majority of the time in a studio the idea is to NOT hear te compression, instead use it to tame an audio file. I know that very generalised but that is what they ate mainly used for. So a bad player using fingers can record a take wig varying levels of velocity. The bass is often kept at a fairly constant level so compression is used to do this.

So in essance a stompbox compressor is generally for an effect, and a studio compressor is for dynamic processing-not to shape the sound of the instrment.

This is not really true either.  In the past stompbox compressors couldn't really stand up to studio rack gear, but times have changed a lot. There are now a huge variety of stompbox compressors available that are just as flexible as a lot of studio rack compressors and offer very high quality compression in a pedal package. Also, studio compressors that are transparent have always been in the minority. Some of the most popular studio compressors have always been those known for their particular tonal color and effect (like the thwack the 1176 gives on a snare drum). This dichotomy between studio and stompbox compressors that you want to impose simply doesn't exist.

[Skrogh]

Bringing this up again, because I too think that bass compression is an interesting topic.
I think most can agree that "best" is very subjective and even "good" can be hard to describe - we do not like the same things after all.
BUT!
User Bongo from TalkBass has made a very extensive compressor review. I haven't counted them all, but he has tried out more than 30!
Of cause this is also subjective, but I do think he is god at describing how, even the comps he doesn't like behave - someone might like it!
Link for a list of all reviews: http://www.ovnilab.com/
Link to his personal top-picks: http://www.ovnilab.com/reviews/toppicks.shtml

These reviews are not written for DIY'ers, but it could be a good place to start. Schematics are on the internet for a couple of the comps listed.

Cheers,
Søren

[pedalgrinder]

while that may be true. with subjectivism within personal choice on compression. The main key to it all is to find a compressor that has both attack and release ratio and threshold is nice depending how the circuit is set up. But at the end of the day a compressor with more functionality surely caters to more styles. I could never understand why so many guitar compressor always just set the release and never gave the function when it is so crucial to setting desired sound. Anyhow i really do think simple compressor or should i say ones that have set setting are very limited.

[gritz]

It is an interesting topic and a challenging one because (imo) having parameters for everything is at odds with what what pedals are about for a lot of people. I know there are folks who will twiddle knobs depending on which song is next when they're gigging, but for most a pedal is either "in" or "out". If every tune requires a subtly different sound then more pedals will be added to the board, or the user will go down the left hand path of racks, dsp and whatnot...

A bass compressor is a challenge as it needs to have a response quick enough to catch the peaks caused by the strings banging on the frets / pickups but without causing unwanted fizzy odd harmonics because of a ripply control envelope. And it shouldn't have that muffled / squashy sound, while still having enough compression to allow sustained notes to be heard over the guitarist who has everything on 11.

And it shouldn't be so complex that the battery goes flat half way through the gig.

That's my philosophy anyway. Maybe Lemmy has got a point...

[Eb7+9]

some comp/limiter designs made allocations for the insertion of EQ circuitry going into the side-chain (decision making) circuit as a means of, say, lestening the over-influence of the low strings versus the lighter strings on the envelope detector ... this occurs by virtue of their greater mass, where the lower strings tend to produce more output voltage per pound of string pluck ...

the idea can be applied to any comp/limiter design but here I show how to tack on simple coil-less eq'ing circuits on the SWR limiter circuit tuned for a 4-string Bass :

http://www.lynx.bc.ca/~jc/SWR-StyleLimiter.html

the advantage over a multi-band approach is it allows to keep the signal path a mono affair which (IMO) yields less phase distortion than a re-combined bi-amping approach ... maybe not a big deal to some, while to others multi-band circuits tend introduces subtle amounts of weirdness to the signal response // a subjective conclusion ...

[pedalgrinder]

one pedal that you can buy which impressed me was the empress compressor check it out if you get a chance. pricey though