Which booster in front of Orange Squeezer?

[mrsuspend]

Hello all,

I love my Orange Squeezer comp but I often find I need to push the input signal a bit to get the right amount of squish. What would be a good compact clean booster circuit to combine with the OS into one enclosure? As these old circuits sometimes don't work well with buffers (my fuzz face hates them for example) I thought I'd ask before heating the iron up...

Thanks!
/Magnus

[stonerbox]

How your Squeezer will responded with a booster in front of it I can't tell (haven't you all ready tried one?) but anyone booster will do really. I guess you would prefer a transparent circuit so try the MXR Microamp. It will do a very nice job (up to +25dB!) and it has a fairly small footprint too. If you want a little bit of coloration then look for the transistor based boosters instead.

Lycka till fellow sexy Swede!

[mrsuspend]

Normally I push it with a Red Ranger which works well enough, but it's not very clean and I don't know if there's something more appropriate out there, or if that combo would mess with the signal for any subsequent pedal. Also the Ranger has features I don't really need. I might just strip the circuit down...

How your Squeezer will responded with a booster in front of it I can't tell (haven't you all ready tried a booster?) but anyone booster will do really. I guess you would prefer a transparent circuit so try the MXR Microamp. It will do a very nice job (up to +25dB!) and it has a fairly small footprint too. If you want a little bit of coloration then look for the transistor based boosters instead.

[stonerbox]

Yeah, that Red Ranger will color the signal. If it sounds semi good with that thing upfront of the compressor then a clean volume booster will sound even better.

edit: It's grammar slaughter, today.

[Mark Hammer]

You do realize that the gain of the OS can be increased to also increase the "squash"?  The stock circuit has a fixed gain of 23x (220k feedback resistor, 10k ground leg) in the op-amp section.  Replace the 10k fixed resistor with 3k3 in series with a 10k pot, and you can crank the gain up to 68x, which should be able to provide enough squish under most circumstances, without deleteriously affecting frequency response.

Since perceived squish is also a function of gain recovery time, consider also bumping up the 4u7 cap to ground after the diode to 10uf, or raising the 100k in parallel with it to 330k.

[stonerbox]

What he said^

You would probably end up with less work and lower noise floor too, which is always kinda crucial.

[mrsuspend]

Thanks Mark! That may well be the better solution. As always I should have read up before screaming for help 

/Magnus

You do realize that the gain of the OS can be increased to also increase the "squash"?  The stock circuit has a fixed gain of 23x (220k feedback resistor, 10k ground leg) in the op-amp section.  Replace the 10k fixed resistor with 3k3 in series with a 10k pot, and you can crank the gain up to 68x, which should be able to provide enough squish under most circumstances, without deleteriously affecting frequency response.

Since perceived squish is also a function of gain recovery time, consider also bumping up the 4u7 cap to ground after the diode to 10uf, or raising the 100k in parallel with it to 330k.

[R O Tiree]

What pickups does your guitar have?  If they're a single-coil (a lot of/most Strats, for example, which have a typical output of +/-200mV), then a stock OS is already at a gain of about 4, so you have to turn the output pot down to match engaged vs disengaged volume when you hit a big chord... So, with an absolute max gain of 23 (and only then with vanishingly small input signals, below about +/-3mV) and you just turned the vol pot down to about 1/4, your max gain available will be only about 6 and it only reaches that gain when your input signal is at its last dying gasp.  This might explain why your OS is a bit underwhelming.  If this is, indeed, the case, then a booster with a gain of about 4 ahead of the OS is a good bet.