While most pedals provide finishing touches to guitar tones, there’s one pedal that pro guitarists can never live without
Every guitarist has their favourite guitar pedal. It's hard to imagine how Tom Morello and While She Sleep's Sean Long would fair without a Whammy or how Voodoo Child would sound without wah.
But, for the most part, pedals are the icing on a tonal cake, rather than the flour or the eggs needed in the baking process. Overdrive pedals are a little different as, when placed in front of an amp, they can greatly influence your guitar tone. But when it comes to indispensable pedals, there is only one winner: compressors.
Periphery's Misha Mansoor hails his compressor as “the only pedal that I never turn off,” and an essential part of his sound. Tosin Abasi, meanwhile, has spoken of the importance of using compressors to add vitality to sterile signals, and Josh de la Victoria never records without one.
So, what do compressors do, and what makes them so special?
Consider me compressed
A compression pedal works by taking the high and low transients of a signal and compressing them together. This makes softer hits more audible and more intense hits a little softer for an even but clear mix. It makes the soundwaves of what you play steadier by removing dramatic spikes.
Funk players have long since used them to bring out the intricacies of their picking patterns, and lead players can achieve greater sustain when a compression pedal is engaged. That also means that it's easier to hear legato runs and selective picking riffs that are a little quieter in nature.
For clean tones, it helps tighten the sound and make sure every nuance of a chord shines.
Compressors work best placed right at the start of the signal chain for a consistent signal throughout. Placing it after effects can dampen their character as the effect will be getting squashed. Think of it like washing dirt of potatoes before cooking them. In that same sense, make sure you set your compression without any other effects switched on, as this doesn’t give a true reflection of what the pedal is doing.
Although there is always one exception to the rule, and this time its wah pedals – otherwise their nuances can be lost.
Typical controls
Not all compression pedals offer the same suite of controls, but their approach play will always be very similar. These are the types of controls you can expect to see on these pedals.
Compression – For the effect's intensity
Level/gain – This helps counter any reduction in volume the compression may create
Attack – How quickly the compressor responds to notes played; the slower the attack, the more signal passes through without being squashed
Release – How quickly the compression eases off. A longer tail creates a more natural sound
Blend – Allows for some of the dry, unprocessed signal to come through
Using compressors in high-gain settings
Compression pedals have become a must-have for countless modern metal guitarists as it can add so much life to your playing. Typically, in high-gain settings, you'll want the threshold to only compress the loudest parts of your playing, with a fast attack and a quick release so it can consistently react to the sheer velocity of the genre.
Conversely, for smoother lead tones, you'll want to slow down the attack and have a more moderate release so that the initial pick attack and bite cuts through but gives a little lift to notes that aren't played quite as hard, without it sounding like it's been botoxed to high hell.
It's also bearing in mind the amp and the pickups at play. As compressors can give your tone an extra kick up the backside, if you have a high-gain amp and high-output amps, the level of compression will want to be lower than if you were using a cheap single coil with a Fender Twin amp.
Using the compressor in the right way, you'll get more harmonic content from your guitar signal, it'll feel like it has more character and life, but you don't want to drive things too hard that you end up with the guitar equivalent of the St. Anger snare.
Get the level just right and you’ll find that you can get more power from the amp and more clarity in equal measure. Once you’ve found your goldilocks settings, it’ll feel like a revelation and you’ll question why you didn’t start using one sooner.
Who uses what?
Naturally, there are countless compression pedals to peruse online, so a look at which pedals pro players prefer can help make that window shopping a little less intimidating.
Misha Mansoor and Tosin Abasi use the pedals they built themselves, the Horzin Devices Calrity Compressor and the Abasi Concepts Micro-Aggressor, respectively.
Misha's was built to “take the guesswork out of compressors,” so that you'll hear a noticeable difference in tone with the stompbox slapped at the front of your signal chain with all the dials at noon.
We set out to make a pedal that's like your favourite hot sauce, he says. you'll want to put it on everything. The heat, then, comes from giving extra sparkle to the high end, and extra glue when digging in deep with chunky palm mutes. It was used all over Periphery's P5.
Abasi's is a boost-style compressor, designed to shape and enhance the transient attack of every note played without diluting thick and heavy tones. In short, this makes your playing clearer without it being any less grunty.
Josh de la Victoria also loves the Micro Aggressor and records with it in front of his Quad Cortex, finding it works better than any of the in-built compressors.
Rabea Massaad, meanwhile, loves the Origin Effects' Cali76 pedal. The compressor found on his Neural DSP plugin is based on it.
So, if you’re wanting to check out some compressors, why not use these as starting points? And if you’re a modeller user, try adding one to a preset you already know and love, and see what difference it makes.
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