Boss CS3 Compressor

darrenw5094

I own a Boss CS3 Compressor. I have mostly Boss pedals, but this boss pedal sounds bad when picking notes during a clean solo or whatever.

It just sounds fake to me....strumming chords....not so bad.
Reviews for this Boss pedal are not so good. We just assume that it's a Boss pedal....so then it must be top quality.

What are the best compressors to go for?.....i want a normal sized pedal like the Boss size.

Hanx,
Darren.

-=al=-

i use the marshall ed-1 chose it over the boss, much beter pedal,


digitech mainsqeeze is pretty normal, i forget the other good one i tihnk its EH that make it, but i like the marshall one a lot mine craped out and i replaced it pretty quick

darrenw5094

What about the MXR super Comp...black pedal.

MXR seem like top pedals.

neonoranges

what does the compressor do?

darrenw5094

Sustains notes longer...levels off all notes so that the volume level of each one is even.......Brightens up clean guitar when strumming chords......

Dord

Its not a pedal but its a really nice compressor....literally!

The Really Nice Compressor by FMR Audio

I'm planning on getting one eventually. They're pretty affordable too.

-=al=-

ah yea thast the one the dyna comp, suposed to be good too, never used one though

thats really nice

Doctor J

Most people don't actually know how to use compressors, how to set them up or how they do what they do. There's a lot more to it than magic sustain. If you look at these four sound waves, the first two are compressed, the second two are natural and uncompressed.



The way a compressor works is you set a threshold, say for example -20dB. When the volume of your signal is under -20dB, your sound goes through without any processing, like the second pair. If you play louder and your volume goes over -20dB the unit will squash the signal, how hard depends on how you set the ratio. If the ratio is 2:1 it'll be fairly subtle, if it's closer to infinity it'll act as a limiter and basically will squeeze the **** out of everything that goes over -20dB... magic sustain but at the expense of your tone. It'll also kill any dynamics to your playing, everything you play will come out at about the same volume, but the harder you play the more of your playing will be squashed out. As you can see on the image, the first two were compressed pretty hard and the sound wave is a fairly unnatural shape... which means a fairly unnatural sound. Ideally, you shouldn't be able to hear the compression on the sound, if you can you've either set the threshold too low and too much of your signal is being effected or the ratio is too high and the natural dynamics of your sound are being strangled. The spike at the beginning of the waves is controlled by the attack - ie: how quickly the compressor comes into action after the signal passes the threshold setting. A little compression can be a wonderful thing, too much will choke the life out of your tone.

To get an idea of where to set the threshold, set the compression to infinity and, starting at full, gradually bring the threshold back while you play until you hear the effect occur on your sound, that's the natural level of your guitar, decide from there where you want your guitar to start being compressed, but try not to go nuts with it and turn the ****in ratio down too