51m0n

Missed that, never been great at the RTFM thing

The Trickfish 1k. Sounded great in the shop. Seemed very loud. In practice wasn't. Also had a very strange noise issue. Sending it back it was returned with different issues. Eventually replaced with an EA iAmp Classic. All is now right with the world...

This is an interesting point. There is another argument regarding on stage dispersion from the guitar cab. Guitarists (in a smaller venue) tend to want their cab to be their main monitor. If a cab has a better dispersion then the angle that the cab faces compared to the angle to the guitarist's ears is less important, which helps the guitarist because he can hear his amp better with less amp output. It also means that as the guitarist moves around they hear their cab amplitude and tone change less. In other words they are happier. This in turn means that the amp output, although more general/dispersed, is actually lower on stage. Good mic technique and placement can really minimise the problem of spillage IME, the lower the spillage level the less the problem, and on stage nearly everything is very very close miced (less than a couple of inches is typical) which means the spillage volume compared to the source volume is pretty tiny. An amp that disperses poorly tends to get cranked up to compensate the poor dispersion. In turn that means that more energy is bouncing around the room (again smaller venues exacerbate this immensely), even though much less is useful (ie getting directly to the guitarists ears). To combat this you tend to have guitarists need a monitor chucking out their amp sound as well. It all just gets worse and worse. If you can get your guitarist to set a very low level on their poor dispersion cab, they will need a comparatively higher level in their high dispersion monitor to compensate. Final point. Guitarists will turn their amp or monitor up until they can hear themselves comfortably. With a poor dispersion amp as the main monitor in a smaller venue the result of this is very directional guitar sound hitting the room, and mixing with whatever you put through the PA. Resulting in nulls and peaks across the stage. If you have a high dispersion amp then less energy tends to hit the room. If you rely on a monitor for a lot of guitar feedback then you have the same wide dispersion as a good dispersion monitor on stage. So yeah whilst excellent dispersion can seem like the last thing you want, in practice it can be a lot more complex than just poor dispersion good for micing, great dispersion bad for micing in my experience.

That's insane.

So @Al Krow offered me a lend of his Becos Stella Compressor to try out and see if it "lived up to the hype" (some of which was mine based upon the feature set alone). So huge thanks to him for that! TLDR: This is flat out the most transparent and full featured pedal format compressor I have ever tried. Which may or may not be what you need I had it for a couple of weeks, used it with my band and mainly in the den listening to it in mixes trying to see how much I could get out of it. I don't normally do gear reviews, because they are time consuming and what might seem great to my ear could be utter crap to yours anyway. Compressors being a particularly ephemeral topic in light of how hard they can be to hear if you don't know what you're listening for exactly I realise I am on a hiding to nothing. So whatever ends up written here please take with a pinch of salt. First points to note, this is a VCA compressor built around a THAT Corporation Analogue Engine chip (which retails for about $2.40 for an order of 2000 chips). So a relatively low cost chip at the heart of this thing. But still a good clean VCA compressor chip in a well designed circuit can still be a phenomenal tool in the right hands. As for how I tested this, I plugged it in between my Roscoe Century Std 5 and my EA iAmp Classic driving a Barefaced Big Baby, whilst playing some of my band's mixes back through my little monitors without the bass channel up to see what the result was in a mix. I also used headphones to really try and focus on the absolute leading edge of the note (the transient) when playing with the attack/release controls. The Lab First Impressions Lots, and lots of controls! All the important contenders are there, and better yet properly named. Ratio, threshold, (make up) gain, attack and release all present and correct. Some of them are frickin' tiny!! I truthfully couldn't really tell where the little arrows were pointing on the wet/dry and saturation controls without my glasses, and the light being 'just right' I would need to fill those in with some white paint to be able to use them easily. Bummer! On the plus side I don't think the micro-pots are in any danger from foot stomps on the big switch, the clearance seems more than adequate. Also, why the dashed lines all the way around the main controls? So I know it goes from 1:1 to infinity:1 ratio but I have no idea where 4:1 or 2:1 or 10:1 is on that pot. What a massive error. Now I know I can calibrate this with a DAW and some time, but for crying out loud why not figure that out for me? Yes I would use my ears to get what I want out of it, but actually I really like being able to get into the ballpark without guessing. That is a real shame on an otherwise great device IMO. The enclosure seems really nice, very solid, yet pretty light. I like it! First Thoughts In Operation No noise at anything approaching a reasonable set up: if you want to dime the output gain or the ratio and threshold its going to accentuate the noise, but that is simply not a realistic set up and even then its what I would call studio clean. I've played with a lot of pedal compressors and they are almost all let down by internal noise. Not this one. Its clean. Like an operating theatre. This is really really transparent. So what does that mean? Its a VCA compressor, it is designed to change the amplitude of the output in such a way that when set up correctly it is very very hard to tell that it is doing anything. In that first picture I was getting between 4 and 12 dB of gain reduction and couldn't hear it out off a mix (yeah I'll come on to that wet/dry setting in a bit). The LEDs are superb, the gain reduction feedback from them is absolutely excellent. Good enough to properly tweek attack/release times to help get the kind of bite point and release point to let you choose how overt you want this to sound. Just superb. SCF That little toggle switch between the Threshold and Attack controls is the Side Chain Filter selector. This is super useful for bassists, because we dont necessarily want the low end of our notes to trigger the compressor, instead letting the mid range and top end be what the compressor is listening to can produce better results. I preferred this control at the L setting where it lets through a lot of the lows and triggers mainly on the top end of the response. This is where the massive tweakability starts though, you can find settings in this pedal that work better with this switch in other settings. There is no right or wrong here, its just what works for you. Knee Switchable between a Hard or Soft knee, again tweakability is what this tool is about. I liked both setting for different ways of approaching compressing. In the above picture I had it on a hard knee, but because of other parameters settings I would still call that a super super transparent gain riding type of setting. Its going to pull up the lower end of the note envelope and quieter notes in general, giving them a lift, but absolutely not adversely affect dynamics and feel because of the other super cool control... Wet/Dry Oh yeah baby! This is the secret super sauce for compressor nerds. Especially coupled with the SCF it means you can set up very overt compression that is smashing everything, then use that purely to pull level up rather than to crack down on it. This is New York or Parallel compression. It totally changes the sound of the compressor and the feel too. Set up like it is in the above photo with the threshold super low and the ratio very serious, with a slooow attack a hard knee and the wet/dry dialling the effect right back compared to the dry signal you will be hard pressed to hear this compressing or feel it, until you put the result in a mix and start playing with a lot of dynamics. Your tone will change as your dynamics do, but your playing will just 'sit' in the mix because as your dry signal drops off the wet signal takes over, being compressed. Dialling that wet/dry over toward wet makes the compressor take over earlier, but even on fully wet this is still very transparent, and grabbing between 4 and 8dB of GR. I always try and dial in an 'always on' kind of setting into a compressor first, because it is the hardest to get right IME. You want to improve the way the bass sits in the mix of every song in a set, without getting in the way of the dynamics, regardless of technique. Sounds impossible, but this kind of compressor gives you all the tools you need to do exactly that. It is simply superb in this role. Lush even. Timing Simply a way to turn on automatic attack/release set to either fast or slow speeds or set it to manual to take advantage of the attack and release controls on the device. Me, I am all about the manual controls on compressors so I didn't even switch this thing out of Manual, but the miniature version of this pedal has great reviews and no manual control at all. Personally these two manual timing controls are why I would want this pedal over the little brother, so this switch is irrelevant to me... Overt Effecty Compression There is another role for compressors though, where you might only want to use them for a single track or section to really grab your tone and make something happen to it that can be heard. Some transparent compressors aren't so good at this sort of thing, personally I dig really good optical compressors on this role, but they ahve to be quiet when pushed to extremes (because thats where you are going to go with them to get them to do this really overtly). VCAs can do this too, they are the toolbox of compressors after all. Basically you want to take all the settings and just accentuate everything, so fully wet (at least to begin with), a higher ratio and a lower threshold for a start. But the real nuance of this type of compression is all about the attack and release. Normally you would be looking for a hard knee for an overt compressor, but I found with the Becos that the soft knee, when coupled with real extremes of threshold and a fast attack time started to get a bit like an optical compressor, the slower curve on the attack time did something really nice to the front of the note as the attack was shortened. Then its a case of dialing in the release so that that compressor gets a chance to reset between notes and yet is long enough to be heard. This is a case of a lot of trial and error. I ended up with something like this, where I backed the wet/dry off a bit so that fingerstyle and slap both seemed to work equally well and got really really fat and super punchy, loved this tone:- Tilt-EQ The Becos has a tilt eq, counter clockwise is more bass, clockwise more treble. Dead simple. Works a treat for the effecty side of things too, if you intend your compression to be for a particular playing style or song or whatever you can really dial in a tone to fit the rest of what you do and convey what you need.This is applied after the compression as far as i can tell and works really nicely. The EQ Pivot point control is just a selector for the mid frequency of the eq. Sat Ok, this is an odd one. They have added a saturation effect that is applied to the Dry side of the Wet/Dry only. I am all for kitchen sink stuff in a pedal, this is apparently a germaium style drive circuit. They claim it sounds like tape saturation, which it really doesn't to my ear, it distorts rather too much and rather too quickly for that I think. And to be honest I found it not particularly useful. Unless you are after a particular 'effecty' use for a particular point in a set. YMMV. Limiting This compressor has a ratio up to infinity and a minimum attack speed of 1.2ms so it could well stand in as a peak limiter. However it measures level over time so it wont be as good at limiting as a dedicated device that is really truly reading for peaks and would have fastest attack times measured in microseconds. Conclusion This is one of, if not the best pedal format compressor I have ever used. Being a VCA circuit its not a one trick pony, lends itself particularly well to transparent compression anyway, but coupled with the advanced features here its capable of incredibly transparent leveling to help 'glue' your bass into the mix better. Or fast enough attack speeds and extreme enough ratios and thresholds to make compression a fun in your face effect or super fat core tones completely achievable. If you want a tool to help on the gig, or to get a 'signature' compressed tone or a device in your hands to help you really get an understanding of what compression can do for you then this has to be really high up on your list. It certainly deserves to be there. Thanks again to @Al Krow for the lend of this. Hope the review helps anyone sat on the fence over this little beauty!

My guitarist is currently being seduced to the darkside by the Quilter 101 Reverb and Bareface 112 Sweet, it'll mean his ridiculously unreliable tube amps will stop screwing up mid gig: both his marshal 2x12 and Fender deville 410 are utterly untrustworthy despite him sinking many times their initial cost into them to try and make them less prone to releasing the magic smoke. I cant wait, the Quilter 101 tone is gorgeous, and the Barefaced guitar cabs are insanely good (and a 112 so dispersion is amazing)... Still going to mic him and give him loads in his monitor and put him through FOH to get a better mix for the punters though!

With that little amp she will need to go through FOH. Which is a very good thing! What possible argument can she have for not being put into the FOH??? Does she really think we are living in the early 70's and she needs a wall of fatally flawed marshal amps to get her point across to the Isle of White audience

Hire something cheap in the meantime or spend more later. Its always the issue I know! I understand the dichotomy, really I do, I have absolutely been there. I'll put it another way, if I lost all the kit we have in a fire tomorrow (jeez hope that never happens but) the only difference I'd make to the mixer solution is to go for an XR32 and the extra 16 channel stage box. Seriously, my band could consume channels like you would not believe for recording (5 mics on percussion, 11 on drums, 3 mics for horns, 1 mic for guitar, 1 mic for vox, 1 DI for bass, 1 mic for bass, 4 DIs for keys, 1 talkback and 1 or 2 for room ambiance - no kidding!). I know, loads more expensive, but the options for recording live would be amazing whenever we got the chance to do the big set up, and the rest of the time we can do the gig with just 16 inputs at a pinch. But the 6 aux outs are the absolute minimum I can work with (I'd really prefer 14 aux outs to give everyone their own stereo monitor mix, but we cant always get what we want and I cant justify 6 Behringer P16-M monitor mixers, our keys player has bought himself one though). I honestly cannot run a PA for the band that doesn't offer everyone a separate monitor (except the horns, they can live with a single monitor mix, but they currently dont use IEMs). We are a big big band, with a lot off noise creating stuff, but every time we think we have enough channels someone comes up with a bright idea and I sometimes can't achieve that goal without more inputs on the desk (samples being one such problem). Our keyboard player has to use his own mini mixer at the moment and I get a 2 channel feed off that. its far from ideal though! What I'm getting at is that no matter the solution you get for today, it will not be ideal, and in the long run you are fairly likely to have to buy again to get the functionality that it becomes obvious you need. Its such a pain!

I would advocate saving for longer, it is cheaper in the long run! Plus with the XR18 you can do a phenomenal show real recording by micin everything properly...

For now... 😁

Well it's all about monitoring. If you go IEM, which is almost inevitable once you can because it's so much easier to play well, you will be looking at: Kick Snare OH(s) Bass Guitar Vox X3 9 Mics minimum. And if you all go IEM then quite possibly a crowd facing ambience mic to give you some positive feedback in the monitors. Everyone will need their own separate mix especially with BVs. It is not possible to do this well without that capability. The BVs will be far more pitch accurate with good monitoring. The cost to do so is not so big. The results are well worth it IME. We play pubs, and we mic everything. Not all of it goes FOH to s great degree but our sound is always commented on for its quality. Yes it's a huge ballache to set up, but it's far nicer to play with great sound in your head and great sound out front IME. We play far better for it....

Nope. This won't work out. Everyone will want refinements to their mix. I guarantee that you won't want the same mix as the guitarist in your monitor. Getting an XR18 means everyone doesn't need the Behringer monitor mix box to do this, saving you a lot of money in the long run I promise...

Yeah you are going to end up frustrated by the xr12 Really good monitoring is a reason to mic everything. It doesn't mean everything has to go to FOH. Your guitarist is making a huge huge huge mistake by having a loud amp and not going through the FOH. He will be ruining the mix for some of the punters at every gig with them having either way too much guitar or not nearly enough depending upon where they are in the room. And he's making it harder for himself to hear his parts because he can't make use of monitors to help.

Yeah baby 🤩🤩🤩 Thanks very much!

An xr18 is good enough to record an EP on. All these tracks were mainly recorded on the xr18, with some percussion overdubs on some other tastier kit. The 4th track is live in a pub no overdubs or editing at all... https://mistersuperjuice.bandcamp.com/releases

Nah its really easy, it just takes a little while... You say "here's your monitor mix <insert band member name>" Band grooves... They say "I want more <themselves normally>" You say "Connect like this if you want to change it" They say "No you do it" You say "Nope, I've done yours, now I am busy doing <insert one of several bajillion other things you need to do>, if you want to change it the only way to do that is own it matey" They say "Whinge whinge whinge, grumble grumble" Repeat at every gig for the next 2 months then it goes quiet because a) they are used to it and b) they really love it.

Set up monitor mixes for everyone. Then spend time to really teach them how to connect to the device with their phone or tablet so that they can only pink torpedo up their own mix. Best way to stop the continual "I need more me!" requests...

Optical is my go to for fat. You can get this big fat sound from optical that others dont give IME. Horses for courses though, whatever bakes your cake and all that, everyone plays different through different gear and has a different idea of what phatttness is anyway VCA tend towards very transparent. Control of the attack/release is what makes them more overt (same can be said for any compressor really)

You need a limiter not a compressor. Common misconception, often put forward by people who know better in the name of keeping it simple, is that a limiter is just a compressor with a high ratio. This is not actually the entire story. A Compressor typically effectively measures volume over a space of time, taking the average volume over that time. This isn't some clever thing done by the electronics, so much as a by-product of the circuit design. An optical compressor is the easiest one for people to imagine this happening in, the electrical energy in the signal lights a lamp (literally) the lamp glow is picked up by a light sensitive device (various types exist). This effectively produces resistance the more light hits it, damping down the level going out of the compressor. Clearly this build up of energy in two devices takes some very measurable time - less obviously the resistance rises and falls in a curve, it is not at all linear to the amount of light hitting the light sensitive component. This is why an optical compressor is a useless limiter, not because you couldnt crank up that damping effect to make it near infinity to one, ie a brickwall limiter. So a limiter (like an 1176) must be super fast. The 1176 is a FET circuit, very very fast (attack times between 20 and 800 micro seconds), also very likely to colour the signal. In the case of the 1176 this colouring is a very nice thing, some engineers have been known to run signal through one without the compression even doing anything. If you set up a limiter at 20:1, with a very very fast attack (careful, too fast and you will get distortion on the leading edge of the transient) with a fast release, then lower the threshold to just clip 3dB off the top of the loudest notes (ie halving the transient volume effective) then you will be far better protected against peaking the desk input. Of course, if its a decent desk you can instead just turn the gain down a tad and do the limiting/compression there....

https://images.app.goo.gl/EcA4fuSNhyeRpzKr6

Yeah, with my sound engineer head on I'd emphasise that the kick drum and bass should be a team, either one can provide the bottom end or the click that signifies the beginning of a note, but it is rare that you can get both to work the same way without them competing. So if the drummer likes a strong transient click on his kick, dont worry about that with the bass so much (don't try and dial it out, just dont emphasise it at all). Its about both frequency mixing and time domain, that click will be over in a flash, the bass needs to be there when it is to add the oomph to the sound. Obviously too much bass eq isnt needed (especially live where it will quickly muddy everything up in the average pub) just a good strong tone. If you both have a strong transient you will tend to sound less tight as well because there will often be a slight 'flam' from the two of you, especially with grooves where the bass and drums are pushing and pulling the time feel in opposite directions. IME...

Hasting Seafood and Wine Festival yesterday afternoon. Nice staging, amazing weather, lots of punters, 30 mins to setup (including a full drumkit swap) went rather well actually. All going swimmingly until shortly into the second track when all signal stopped coming out of the pedalboard. It still had power, just stopped producing signal for the lovely amp to turn into noise. Bit of a head spinner, hit the mute switch on the amp, bypass the fx in the hope that will make noise happen again and joy of joys out comes the noise. Got to say this is the first gig with the EA iAmp Classic, what a ridiculously great sounding amp, and so much oomph, running on about 50% output it was just huge tone. Very hot in the marquee and this amp has no fan, the chassis got warm to the touch, not quite hot, other than that it was fine. Having said all that to make this amp last as long as possible I might invest in a small desk fan to keep airflow over it. Honestly though the FX issue threw me for a couple of tracks, moving out of the headspace of playing into the "fix this issue really fast, like right now" headspace really breaks me out of my stride. Still the band were flying, super professional turnarounds, crowd seemed to like it, nice to be on a decent stage, got back into it soon enough. Had a blast all in all

If I enjoyed it more than what have now then yes. But to be honest I wouldn't...

Nope, but the theme from Knight Rider is too much fun 🤩

Yep, once you get all the way to being able to predict how a specific compressor will sound given a certain input source, try one with a completely different circuit. Similar settings will sound completely different. Go through this enough and you start to get a feel for the compressor most likely to suit the sound in your head. A VCA compressor (like the Becos) is a superb place to start because its a bit of a toolbox, tends to be capable of very transparent compression but has enough parameters to get a lot of more overt compression effects working. In contrast an optical compressor tends to be a bit of a one trick pony, its all about the attack release curve and how that can make your bass sound. A FET compressor, is really a limiter type circuit, FETs are super super fast. A real tube (vari-mu) compressor tends toward a mix between an optical and a VCA. And are hens teeth in the pedal world (Compressore being the only one I have ever heard of). If you want to have a go at all of these on the cheap your best bet IMO is download Reaper, load in a piece of music with no bass, put down a bass line, and play with Reacomp, its about the most full featured compressor I have found (you can change the duration of time it measures for RMS level ffs!!!!) that also happens to be free. This way you also get to concentrate on what the hell the compression is doing rather than playing anything into a compressor and fiddling with the knobs. Get far enough down that route and you can cover off parallel compression (New York compression), side chaining, filtered compression, and with ReaXcomp even multiband compression. For free. Do the chaps at Reaper a favour and buy a license for $60 dollars, they've saved you thousands of pounds in buying kit to allow you to learn how to use something well when you get it. Tell them I sent you