I Hate Compression!

[BigRedX]

The problem that compression has is that unlike other effects most of the time if you can hear it working then you haven't set it up right.

 

But, like other aspects of the bass guitar sound it's one that really needs to be adjusted while playing with the rest of the band.

[Grimalkin]

2 hours ago, krispn said:

Jamerson used to show up drunk and play. While he was (possibly) making conscious decisions about his note choices (as in he was just playing and grooving) and I certainly don’t think he was giving tone and mixing advice to the engineers.

 

Jamerson wasn't drunk all of the time, in fact that one instance is the only time I've read that he was really drunk. Check out the book: Standing in the Shadows of Motown, it mentions there that Jamerson's signal was goosed purposely for slight break-up and natural tube compression.

[ped]

Maybe some of you might like a limiter then! Certainly my preference. 

[fretmeister]

Placement of a compressor often overlooked too. Makes such a difference.

 

If I want a saturated drive sound - like a proper zero dynamics 1980s widdly guitar > Tubescreamer > Raging valve amp type thing then a load of compression with a high output hitting the drive is great. But that means I would not be able to control the drive amount with my right hand. The signal hitting the overdrive would remain pretty constant due to the compressor.

 

So for a more hand-controllable approach I can put the compressor after the overdrive. So the amount of drive can be controlled by my right hand, but the compressor then equals out the volume. Digging in then gives me control of the drive only and controls the dynamics so digging in doesn't cause notes that are too loud. With a valve amp running loud that compression is done by the amplifier. Bass amps tend to have a larger dynamic range and don't do that as much so an outboard unit is needed for the same effect. There's no difference really, the work is just being done by a different box in the signal chain.

 

 

Placement before and after EQ is probably even more important. EQ into a compressor can - with a lot of compression - render the EQ settings pretty useless as the compressor  mashes all the frequencies into a narrow range. So compressor and then EQ gives back that EQ control.

 

Billy Sheehan's rig goes even further - there's a vid on it somewhere. In his old rack he had a minimum of 2 compressors running in a single path and sometimes 3. Before pedals, after pedals but before the amp, and then sometimes in the amp FX loop as well. All doing different things depending on the placement. And no doubt the FOH guy was adding more.

 

The only place where I've seen compression get used less is on drums - but that seems to be because more and more drummers are using triggers rather than the acoustic sounds of the tubs. Just trigger a perfect sample every time instead, and no worries about mic bleed from the other stuff.

 

 

[Cuzzie]

22 hours ago, jimfist said:

Chances are that if you're using any amp with a tube in it, you're experiencing some form of compression.

For compression to exist, you don't need to have a box with the label "COMPRESSOR" on it.

Not to mention speaker compression when those speakers are being driven hard, even by a very clean, high headroom solid state amp.

tube compression is a whole other topic!!!! But point taken

 

 

[Cuzzie]

8 hours ago, Boodang said:

Interestingly, and depressingly, a study was done by a UK university very recently that came to the conclusion that there is no level of alcohol intake that is safe, including the eponymous odd glass of red wine.

As regards compression, I don't use any on my double bass (being acoustic I feel it sounds better without it), but with my bass guitars I use compression in all its forms from light to super aggressive as a means of tone manipulation. 

no doubting the study or what you say

 

But

 

There is a whole heap of evidence looking at a healthy gut microbiome leading to healthy body overall

 

key ingredients

 

Legumes

Blue cheese

high cacao super dark chocolate 

 

and

 

Red wine

Edited October 4, 2022 by Cuzzie
Spelling

[fretmeister]

11 hours ago, Cuzzie said:

no doubting the study or what you say

 

But

 

There is a whole heap of evidence looking at a healthy gut microbiome leading to healthy body overall

 

key ingredients

 

Legumes

Blue cheese

high cacao super dark chocolate 

 

and

 

Red wine

 

 

Blue cheese, peanuts, chocolate and a load of red wine.

 

Just organising a healthy saturday night..... 😎 

[Cuzzie]

23 minutes ago, fretmeister said:

 

 

Blue cheese, peanuts, chocolate and a load of red wine.

 

Just organising a healthy saturday night..... 😎 

Few legumes and some hummus with tahini dip - it’s a proper party 

 

throw in a cheese and pineapple hedgehog and I am there

[fretmeister]

Peanuts are a legume so I'm covered.

You can have all the pineapple though. Horrible stuff.

I'll swap mine for those mini picked onions.

[Cuzzie]

3 minutes ago, fretmeister said:

Peanuts are a legume so I'm covered.

You can have all the pineapple though. Horrible stuff.

I'll swap mine for those mini picked onions.

few more of the legs for variety

 

hedgehog with onions it is!!

[rmorris]

1 hour ago, fretmeister said:

Peanuts are a legume so I'm covered.

You can have all the pineapple though. Horrible stuff.

I'll swap mine for those mini picked onions.

 

The pineapple should be on a pizza ???

[rmorris]

14 hours ago, Cuzzie said:

tube compression is a whole other topic!!!! But point taken

 

 

 

wrt Tube compression (aside...Tube, is this Talkbass now ? 🙂. We'll have "Valves" here thank you very much)

yeah - the dynamic range is reduced (compressed). But it acts on each waveform cycle instantaneously, rather than reacting to a time averaged signal level.

Signal is clipped it to varying degrees producing additional harmonics.

With reference to the OPs concerns around "Overtones" - this process increases or adds "overtones" (harmonics).

 

With 'normal' compression there is some distortion produced when the gain (attenuation) is being altered.

But this is not the intended purpose an the effect is of a much lower order.

[fretmeister]

1 hour ago, rmorris said:

 

The pineapple should be on a pizza ???

 

No. It should be in the sea with anyone who likes pineapple on pizza.

 

[Lozz196]

2 hours ago, fretmeister said:

 

No. It should be in the sea with anyone who likes pineapple on pizza.

 

I’ll get my water-wings

[rmorris]

3 hours ago, Lozz196 said:

I’ll get my water-wings

Water Wings. A swimming Paul McCartney tribute act ?

[rmorris]

Yeah - I mean he was good on the Beatles and all that. But little will surpass the Wings version of the Crossroads theme tune (classic Tony Hatch) that they used for particularly dramatic episodes.

Disclaimer: May make no sense to younger, non-UK or those that weren't permitted to watch ITV.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 6, 2022 by rmorris
Correction and extra info'

[BigRedX]

12 hours ago, rmorris said:

Yeah - I mean he was good on the Beatles and all that. But little will surpass the Wings version of the Crossroads theme tune (classic Tony Hatch) that they used for particularly dramatic episodes.

Disclaimer: May make no sense to younger, non-UK or those that weren't permitted to watch ITV.

 

It was included at the end of the "Venus And Mars" album.

[Stub Mandrel]

On 21/09/2022 at 16:03, Osiris said:

 

Can I respectfully ask that you give this a read - Killed my tone (ovnilab.com)

 

I have stopped using compression - even though my compressor has the general quality of being a 'better knob' (I suspect it limits my bottom end bringing out the overtones rather than killing them). I use it with everything at, or close to 12 o'clock - largely on the basis that most pedals are designed to work best at middle settings and the extremes are usually exactly that (classic example, the HM2 where everything dialled is the classic tone, simply because it is so extreme!)

 

This bit of your link possibly explains why:

 

Quote

The amp gets more or less distorted or compressed in normal operation, without necessarily having any obvious overdrive effect or compressor feature. The amp will clip/sag based entirely on the level of the signal. So for people who play tube amps loudly for example, a compressor really will have a negative impact on the dynamic sound that player is accustomed to. But for people who play clean, expecting no amp distortion, there's no impact. So my comment about making dynamics easier to hear is aimed at clean-tone playing, not clipped-amp playing.

 

I set the gain on my hybrid amp (Bass Terror) individually for each bass so that I can go from a clean sound to an overdriven one by digging in, and get real dirt/clank if I need it (almost exclusively fingerstyle player).

 

I suspect a compressor could make finding that point more difficult and make me have to work harder to change between the sounds with my technique.

 

Thoughts?

 

[Osiris]

2 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 (I suspect it limits my bottom end bringing out the overtones rather than killing them).

 

Some pedal comps can reduce the low end on bass especially if they're designed with the guitar in mind. Dyna comp style circuits - of which there are a million variants are notorious for low end loss. This is why dedicated bass comps, multi-band compression and side chain high pass filtering have been developed as they help reduce any low frequency loss. With a multi-band you can have separate compressor that deal with the lows and high working in unison, that way the lows don't swamp the highs and you have independent control over the low end makeup gain (amongst other parameters) so you can boost the lows more if you want to, the TC Spectracomp is a decent multi-band unit. High pass filtering is a technique where the compressor is 'tuned' to react less strongly, or not at all, to bass frequencies, the Cali76 Compact Bass and DG Hyper Luminal both have adjustable HPF's, for example. While this might sound counter intuitive (to me at least) it actually increases the low end weight of the compressed signal.  

 

2 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

I use it with everything at, or close to 12 o'clock - largely on the basis that most pedals are designed to work best at middle settings and the extremes are usually exactly that

 

A fair assumption for a lot of pedals but not when it comes to compressors. This is where having a good understanding of compression will start to pay off, you need to understand what the Threshold control does in order to set it suitably - this controls the point at which the compressor applies the compression. There's no single answer to where you set the threshold as there are a number of factors to consider such as bass output level (a hotter bass will require a lower threshold, for example). A comp with decent metering is really helpful for setting the threshold just right. Set the threshold too low and you may not trigger the compression, too high and you'll obliterate your dynamics. My preference is to set the threshold at the point where it catches the signal peaks (unfortunately I'm only human and therefore lack a totally impeccable technique ) to keep the bass signal even when digging in hard but allows me to retain dynamics when playing softer. 

 

The importance of the threshold is probably where most people go wrong with compressors, IMO.

 

3 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

I set the gain on my hybrid amp (Bass Terror) individually for each bass so that I can go from a clean sound to an overdriven one by digging in, and get real dirt/clank if I need it (almost exclusively fingerstyle player).

 

I suspect a compressor could make finding that point more difficult and make me have to work harder to change between the sounds with my technique.

 

Thoughts?

 

 

This is easily doable with a suitably set threshold and when set up properly it would make the change in sounds easier as well as potentially saving your fingers from having to dig in so hard! It's all about the threshold. 

[Stub Mandrel]

36 minutes ago, Osiris said:

It's all about the threshold. 

 

It's all about never having an opportunity to play with the band at gig volumes for a whole afternoon doing nothing but set up my sound and diddle with pedals!

I might suggest we have a rehearsal dedicated to playing with our sounds ratehr than songs.

[BreadBin]

I like compression, if set correctly it allows me to really dig in without drowning out the rest of the band. I recently picked up a Darkglass Super Symmetry and I love it - my pick playing in particular has been massively helped.

[Osiris]

12 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

 

It's all about never having an opportunity to play with the band at gig volumes for a whole afternoon doing nothing but set up my sound and diddle with pedals!

I might suggest we have a rehearsal dedicated to playing with our sounds ratehr than songs.

 

You just need to set the threshold so that it works in conjunction with the amps gain control. Just bear in mind that if you swap basses you'll likely have to tweak the threshold and possibly the amp gain too. Or if you have an active bass and make any adjustments to the onboard preamp you'll probably need to fine tune the settings too. 

 

Once you've set things up right you might find that your driven tone is more consistent too. 

 

Edited October 6, 2022 by Osiris
Adding additional thoughts

[BigRedX]

I suppose because I have mostly played in bands where the sounds the various musicians use are as important as the notes we play, a good proportion of any rehearsal can be given over to working on these aspects. With any sound - be it synthesiser, guitar or bass (or even the programmed drums) I expect to be able to get fairly close to the ideal at home and only have to do some fine tuning in the practice room once the rest of the band are there, but that is based on 40 or so years of working like this.

[Stub Mandrel]

[51m0n]

Still people on here not getting compression. 

 

My advice, find a local studio thar does sound engineering courses and go to one.

 

You will learn a lot more than arguing on here.

 

Simple answer, bassists know jack about compression,  it's definitely sound engineer territory.  Learn to be a sound engineer so you can make yourself sound better as  bassist in the context of a band.

Edited October 30, 2022 by 51m0n