Compression and Boost

[bish]

Compression and Boost

 

So I picked up an EH LPB-1 and a Soul Preacher, (The Soul Preacher I had to exchange as the first one I got had something wrong with it) and so far I really like both of them. The LPB-1 is nice and was really inexpensive and the Soul Preacher does a good job of evening out the sound from my Baritone HH, keeps the bass from sounding too overly boomy. it also boosts a bit if you turn up the volume and adds a little bit of dirt which actually sounds pretty good with my Baritone as well, but if you go too far past unity gain it does get a bit noisy.

 

I know boost can go in any number of places in the pedal chain, at the beginning if you want it to push other pedals and at the end if you want to boost everything in the chain. I put mine at the beginning to boost my distortion pedal a bit. My question is from everything I've read compression should be one of the first things in the chain, but does a boost pedal usually work better before or after a compression pedal.

 

I've tried it both ways but I haven't really decided which sounds better yet, so I thought I'd check on what the conventional wisdom is.

 

One interesting thing I've found about the Soul Preacher though is that it seems to want it own power supply just like the Holy Grail. I connected it to a Onespot and the Soul Preacher created a terrible ringing noise just like a Holy Grail does, the ringing goes away when I put in a battery or connect it to it's own power supply.

 

Thanks,

 

-bish

[MegaTom]

The conventional wisdom is that comp. can either go at or near the beginning of your chain, or at/near the end of your chain... or possibly at/near dead center.

Like you, I put my clean boost up front... I like the way it pushes my Green Machine (a tube screamer clone of sorts) from very light OD to a harder distortion. With this, I like to have a compressor after the OD to control the overall volume level some when I hit the boost - so I get more distortion, but not too much more volume.

When I'm looking to smooth out string dynamics for arpeggios or add sustain, I like to have the comp at or near the very beginning. I've seen lots of people use it as a sustainer by putting it after OD/Fuzz/Distortion, but I think this raises the inherent noise level from these types of pedals too much, so I prefer to sustain the natural/unaffected signal from my guitar before sending it to the dirt.

But in the end, like everything else, your mileage may vary.

[Pankot]

For an OD, one thing that can make a big difference is whether it's asymmetric clipping or symmetric clipping. The first style has the property that even at high levels of drive (and thus clipping), if you hit a chord hard you still get a much louder sound - because only one half of the wave form is clipped. For this sort of OD, compression after the OD can be useful to even out the volume difference, just as you would use it on a clean sound.

 

The second style (which also corresponds to most distortions) has a different basic property - if you play hard, you just get more crunch/distortion, no significant volume increase. There are no volume-based dynamics, so further compression doesn't do very much. Putting the compressor first makes more sense here.

 

One thing a compressor can really help with in my experience: if you have a dirt pedal that is prone to farting out on full chords, a compressor in front of it will clean up those Townshend-esque windmills.

 

All that said, in the end it's what works for your style and tastes that matters.

[bish]

Cool thanks for the replies. Gives me some ideas about ways to try it out. Over all I'm very happy with both so I'll just play around with them some more and figure out what I like best.

Thanks again,

-Bish