compressor clean blend

[blackieNYC]

Taking in the whole Orange Smoothie thread, I got curious about this ridiculous clean blend thing.  Mark points out that the clean can give you a bit of the initial attack. Jon would not approve - I put it in an optical compressor.
I've built the Madbean 4:1 which has a clean blend.  I expected to dial it back to the simple Afterlife which has no blend.

I like a compressor-as-effect sound (being a bit of a sloppy player) and while the 4:1 doesn't lose a ton of highs, I tried filtering some lows out of the clean. To add a little brightness. Then I thought "let's hear that noise when the sustain pot is full up".  There's a bit of noise so, why not, I filtered the highs out of the compressor half (looking there first for a medium-ish reduction in noise) which ended up a 10nf to ground just before the comp pot.  The small series cap in the clean signal (currently 2.2 nf) is just before the clean pot.

It's great!  I'll be playing with cap values a little more but I think I've gotten rid of the notch.  I tried to do a frequency sweep to level the response but that turned out a little incoherent so I'm doing it by ear, comparing it to bypass and to the unfiltered compressor.  The HP and LP filters will be on a toggle.  I'll rearrange my test setup so I can see what the filters' crossover looks like.

So this is squish-capable, but a snappy attack effect is possible at the same time. Being an optical compressor, this design needs a blend less than other designs would - the opto is slow so the attack is not instant, so I'm told. I would think the squishiest compressors (folks seem to say that's the Ross and Dynacomp) would benefit from this 2-band approach.

[blackieNYC]

This went really well - but I do have a question.  In the schematic I have inserted a .0022 mf cap in series between the output of IC1a and the Clean pot.  Again, all I want is for a little highs to come thru from the clean signal.  I'd like to get a little more gain, with it being only high freqs - The clean pot only delivers enough highs when the Comp pot is fairly low.  I think I could raise the gain of IC1b - couldn't I?  Increase that 22K R6 to 100K?  Wouldn't this let me leave the compression gain down and get more out of the clean blend gain?

Madbean's awesome 4:1 compressor.