Controlling volume

quicklickpaddy

I'm having awful difficulty with volume spikes and falls because of my pedals on stage. Adjusting volumes individually (where it's possible) isn't doing much for me either. I have a volume pedal at the end so but it's generally too late by the time i need to use it. Would another compressor at the end of the chain do much for me? Or possibly even investing in a rack compressor to keep the volume steady?

Probably worth mentioning that I'm daisy chaining but I don't think that should affect the volume spikes all that much?

CianRyan

Are you running into the input or an effects loop?
I may be completely wrong buy think running an effects loop keep th volume steady.

As said, could be completely wrong.

quicklickpaddy

Ha yeah, I'm running through the effects loop. That just means your effects aren't driving the pre-amp as much. The volume pedal is at the end of the effects loop pedals so it's kinda acting as a master volume

seachto7

I have the same problem myself with overdrive, I always end up going down fiddling with the pedals during gigs, it's either too loud or too quiet etc.... very hard to nail down settings for my "sound"

rcaz

seachto7 wrote: »

I have the same problem myself with overdrive, I always end up going down fiddling with the pedals during gigs, it's either too loud or too quiet etc.... very hard to nail down settings for my "sound"

It's always really hard to get a good distorted sound with a band for me. Mids are like volume, volume doesn't seem to do anything if there's no mids in the tone. 'Cause of this I never use my Big Muff anymore, and rarely my RAT.

Hayte

If you have a compressor at the end of your signal chain and it isn't catching transients then its probably set up wrong. What controls does your compressor have?

Envelope attack/release? Threshold? Ratio? Input/Output gain?

quicklickpaddy

No, I don't have a compressor at the end of my chain. I'm asking if that would fix my problems?

Hayte

Yes it would since a compressor is an auto gain reduction tool. The oft used analogy is of a person dragging down the output volume fader every time the input volume gets too loud.

Compressors were traditionally used on radio talkie shows to automatically homogenise the volume of someone speaking into a microphone. If the speaker got excited they could shout really loud (and could overload the mic) or they would get loud plosives if they moved too close to the mic. Either way, sudden large disparities in volume can be really unsettling for the listener because its startling. It may even damage your ears if you are already listening to the radio really loud.

Compressors can use auto gain reduction for sound shaping and you can warp the signal quite dramatically if you use fairly extreme and non discriminant settings. If you only want to use a compressor to suppress transients then you call it a limiter. Limiters and compressors have different names but they are fundamentally the same thing. A compressor can function like a limiter if you set the threshold at the desired peak level, set hard knee and then dial up a massive compression ratio (like 30:1 or otherwise as high as it will let you). This way pretty much any signal that goes over your desired peak level gets immediately squashed.

How the compressor works depends on the threshold and ratio settings (or in some compressors based on the input and ratio settings). If you don't get the result you want its usually because:

1) the compressor is not set up correctly.
2) the compressor doesn't give you enough controls. Alot of pedal compressors are kind of limited and don't give you indepedent threshold and ratio controls.

Finally, if you change the volume on your amp or you play consistently harder/softer, you will need to change the compressor settings accordingly because the way it works is entirely dependent on the volume of the signal going into it.

If you don't have a VU meter or you don't plug into a digital mixer at some point (which has full scale meters) then setting threshold/ratio is mostly guess work. You really want some kind of peaking meter to tell you the signal level going into the compressor and the signal level going out. If you play or record into a computer this is easy since there are tonnes of DAWs and software compressors that have peaking meters built in and tell you how much gain reduction is being applied (i.e. Sonnox Oxford).

music producer

You'll most likely want the compressor responding pretty quickly, and if it has a "knee" parameter, it will probably feel smoother and more musical if you have it set up to start gently pulling the volume back a few db before it reaches the actual volume at which you originally were wanting to compress.

On the other hand, if your onstage volume varies dramatically, you might wish to set the knee rather high, with the compression ratio set pretty low, so there is a broad, gentle reduction in output over a wide dynamic range.

But there's nothing like trial and error to discover settings that work for you; live, as in the studio, what matters is what it sounds like, not what settings somebody suggests.

quicklickpaddy

Well as of tomorrow I'll have a PigTronix Philosopher's Tone at the front of the chain but my other compressor is just the Behringer CS-3 knockoff (i.e. pure shite). I was thinking of getting the Behringer rack compressor/limiter because it's very wallet friendly and it has all the independent controls but seen as I'm not going to be spending a huge amount on it anyways, would the stomp box do me any favours or just end up making everything feedback?

music producer

Sorry - I don't know about the stomp box - not a guitarist! Hope the PigTronix does the trick for you.