Pawn Shop Comp 2.0 - User Manual
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them in for the PSC adds a ton of distortion. The 5751 is always very gentle, and even at
normal gain settings will tend to round out the signal a bit. Good for softer things like
quieter vocals.
As stated earlier, 3dB up on OPERATING LEVEL pushes the whole track forwards and more
"in your face." The operating level is sort of a secret weapon on the PSC.
You'll
fi
nd that you end up using the PSC on a lot of channels in your mix. A nice trick is to
leave the Operating Level alone on all of them, and then goose any track you want to stand
out a bit - a lead vocal or instrument, a kick, by 3dB and it sort of... jumps out. This is not
like Spinal Tap's "This one goes to 11." There is a change in saturation and harmonics when
you push on Operating level that seems to shove things out of the speakers a bit more.
If you want to cause all sorts of noise and distortion, turn down the OUTPUT a lot and
crank up BIAS and PREAMP and OPERATING LEVEL... you'll get total mayhem.
A CAVEAT
Because the Pawn Shop Comp is a digital emulation, you can tweak it in ways that you
would never do with a physical piece of audio equipment. In the real world things blow up
and burn out. HOWEVER, all digital equipment is capable of tremendous amounts of gain,
the Pawn Shop Comp included. Digital clipping is a real possibility, and a digitally clipped
signal going through speakers at a high volume is NOT GOOD AT ALL. You don’t want to
burn out the voice coils of your speakers, so by all means experiment but be sure to watch
the levels feeding out of your gear and into your monitor ampli
fi
cation: you don’t want to
digitally clip signals.
IDEAS FOR APPLICATIONS
The Pawn Shop Comp wasn’t designed to do any one speci
fi
c type of task. It’s not a vocal
compressor or a bus compressor. It works well everywhere. In fact, for many users, it is the
fi
rst processing plugin reached for when working on a track. Because it is so versatile, and
because it is so hard to get a bad or unusable sound out of it, it is di
ffi
cult to give speci
fi
c
setting for a particular application. So, here are some ideas and guidance to get you
started.
On Bass
The Pawn Shop Comp combines the warmth and smoothness of a tube compressor and
the punch of a FET limiter, so it is a natural
fi
t for bass. Start with the ATTACK to about 1
o’clock and the RELEASE to about 10 o’clock, and RATIO at 8:1. Turn down THRESHOLD to
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