noticeable the effect, the more dynamic range, and the more
“natural” the signal will sound. Adjust this control to find a
perfect balance for your application.
• Setting the Gain Control: The gain control, as the name implies,
adjusts the output level of the pedal, and amplifies it over the
normal signal level. The simple explanation is that it compensates
for the signal level lost as a result of compression. To set it up in
a standard way, toggle the pedal on and off repeatedly adjusting
the gain until you hear no difference in level between active and
bypassed. However, this pedal is capable of a lot of output gain,
+20db to be exact. So, some users may want to run it at a level
above normal to produce a thickening effect with other pedals
or recording equipment in sequence, or to push a quality tube
amp in to breaking up. It makes a great boost pedal. Just give it
a shot! One word of note about the Gain control. If you find
yourself pushing the gain quite a bit above midway or zero (db)
in order to get unity gain, your threshold is set too low and your
compression level may be set too high. The more gain that is
introduced, the more noise that will be introduced. For the most
quiet operation, adjust threshold and compression settings to use
the lowest amount of output make-up gain possible.
• Attack and Release: This pedal has no attack and release
controls. There is a reason for this. There is a certain figure that
just sounds good as far as compression goes; and that’s 125 dB/
second. With feed forward compressors that use this type of
true-RMS detector you use a single time constant parameter.
The timing capacitor gives you attack and release times that
