Osiris

Is there anybody out there? - Pink Floyd

Had I have seen this earlier I'd have had a pair of the 1x12 cabs, even allowing for VAT that would still have only worked out around £250~ish for them both. Bügger! I'm guessing it's end of line blowout stock from Tech 21 so there's unlikely to be any more at that price. Unless anyone knows different?

Where I find my heaven - Gigolo Aunts

Second chance - Shinedown

Slow and steady wins the race. Good job really as speed isn't so easily achieved when dragging an exoskeleton around at all times 🦀. But baby steps are the way to go, it's not something anybody will master overnight, take your time, experiment with the various controls, listen and feel to what's happening to the sound, how much more consistent and controlled the bass is, how it sits better with the instruments around it, how it becomes more punchy and so on. As a sweeping generalisation less is usually more, and embrace the fact nobody other than you may notice or care.

I've played with the Tone Print editor for both the Sprectracomp and the Hyper Gravity and it's pretty much identical in terms of parameters, although I seem to the ink the SC had 48 different settings you can configure last time I looked, which admittedly was 2 or 3 years ago. My first reaction was bewilderment too but you've essentially got the same controls for each of the 3 bands - plus a couple of global parameters such as crossover points. If you have a little understanding of what each control does, your basic threshold, ratio, attack, release, knee then it soon becomes pretty intuitive to use and you can be creating your own sounds shortly after. For example, with my Hyper Gravity I set up a patch that was essentially a single band compressor, I set the low band to work as an adjustable high pass filter assigned to one of the physical controls and set the high band at a high frequency (<5KHz, IIRC) with a low ratio to work as subtle brightness boost on another of the physical controls. The mid band did the heavy lifting of the main, full band-ish compression. The patch resulted in being part compressor, part 3 band EQ. The other 2 physical controls were one adjusting the threshold of the mid band and a master volume which also brought in more clean signal as you boosted it. While dual and multi band compressors are technically 'better' for bass compression I do like the overt sound of single band bass compression, when done right I like the way that it clips the lows, especially when using a more immediate compressor type, FET designs being perfect for this type of thing. But you can do what you want with the TC pedals, everything from subtle and transparent to flat out squash. With the Tone Print app the world, as they say, is your lobster.

Come as you are - Nirvana

Sounds perfect, I'll keep an eye and nose out for the post man over the next few days.

Machine gun etiquette - The Damned

I feel dirty and ashamed for saying this but I'll say it anyway... @Al Krow I actually agree with you on this. There, I said it. . As much as I usually enjoy Steve Cook's Premier Guitar vids, he doesn't really do that Boss comp justice in that video. At the time points you mentioned it is very squashed sounding - although in respect to the comment you made about him managing to get a bad sound out of it when he said it was impossible, you need to remember he's playing a very hot 18V bass through it so he's hitting the threshold a lot harder than you would with a 'normal' bass, which is what is causing the excessively squashed sound at times. It's this amount of audible squash, where you can very obviously here the compression working, that people complain about compression killing their dynamics. The Bass Gear Review video, below, shows off the pedal - and therefore compression - in a much more positive light, IMO. Just about every playing style is covered and in almost all of them you can hear the effect of the compression when the pedal is engaged, the bass sounds more refined, controlled and more even while in most cases the dynamics are still retained. Pay particular attention to the jolly Frenchman at 3.53, listed to how once the pedal is kicked in at 4.02 all of a sudden there is extra definition and separation between the notes making the piece sound more... professional, for want of a better description. And that's just from listening to it through crappy laptop speakers. The Boss wasn't previously on my radar even though I love their LMB-3 Bass Limiter pedal, but I'm going to have to try the BC-1X out for myself after watching this. If anyone wants me over the next few days I'll be in the bath vigorously scrubbing myself with a wire brush and some Domestos.

Ooh, that looks like fun, I'd like to have a play with something like that. But then again I'd only end up using one channel, maybe two if I was feeling really clever (rarely these days) but it's somewhat overkill for my needs. But seeing as we're on compressors again, I wonder how long it'll be before everything goes south again!?!? In terms of things I'd run away from it's got to be anything sunburst. Awful. Just awful. And tort scratch plates which are equally disgusting. The two together are an affront to all that is good and holy in the world. Oh, and Stingrays, that weird nasal mid range thing they do really irritates my delicate sensibilities.

Got the time - Joe Jackson

Do you still believe that to be the case?

Room a thousand years wide - Soundgarden

Ego, the living planet - Monster Magnet

Nailed it! @Al Krow unfortunately I am no longer in a band so cannot grant your request for audio with and without compression with other musicians, plus, I do not have a DAW for recording any clips at home. While I appreciate that this all sounds like feeble excuses you are, however, more than welcome to bring a laptop with some suitable software over (who knows, I may even offer you a cheese sandwich this time) over so that I can appease your desire. I've got a couple of different poxy pedal comps plus a few models on my Stomp that we can run through, although having been through a number of Helixes you are no doubt familiar with the various options that the Helix family has to offer. Alternatively I'm sure @Cuzzie will happily post his clip again where even though it's only a phone recording you can clearly hear him engage his compressor, although it is a might Cali Compact Bass that he's using which does have it's own magic pre-amp flavour. I think @krispn may also have some useful clips that he may be willing to share. But nobody is forcing anyone to use a compressor. I love them and to me the bass doesn't feel right without compression when I play, but as @Kev and @Jus Lukin have both said, far more eloquently than I have, what's going on is subtle, it's a feel thing, rather than an obvious, in your face change. No, the audience are unlikely to notice unless they're other bass players and even then they're only likely to notice if they use compression themselves. But that doesn't automatically make compressors pointless. If you don't like them or don't want to use them, that's great. Don't. But to me, compression helps my bass sound and feel more alive, it helps my sound sit better with other musicians so I'll carry on using it.

I don't get cross about them but as the OP says there's a lot of misconceptions about them and some widespread misunderstanding. For example, two or three years ago there was a series of threads about compression by a certain relentless individual that were at best, being kind to said individual, as pointless as they were unhelpful. Unfortunately, threads like those just continue to perpetuate misconceptions and spread further confusion about something that a lot of people don't really understand to begin with. That's not meant to be condescending in anyway, it's just that a lot off bass players by their own admission don't really get compressors or compression. I just try to offer a balanced and reasoned counterpoint to threads like those in order to try to bring balance back to The Force.

There ain't half been some clever bastards - Ian Dury and the Blockheads

The golden shore - Warrior Soul

Tie me kangaroo down sport - Uncle Rolf

The eternal - Joy Division

Local boy in the photograph - Stereophonics

Stutter - Elastica

No feelings - Sex Pistols

Institutionalised - Suicidal Tendencies