Moog Music Forum

I know that the matter of compressors have been discussed before, but I haven't found any coclusive answers browsing the forum.

I'm preparing to play LP live and I'm doing some patch changes while playing there is no time to adjust the volume and some of the patches are getting to loud or to silent. I don't want to edit the patches to make them equal level, cause this way I would have to lower the volume on most of the patches and that's not a good thing (signal-to-noise ration blah blah...).

I'm thinking of buying a compressor to level my sound. I would like something transparent and preferably analog or analog with character that will colour the sound in a nice, but not very extreme way.

Any suggestions?

Though I wouldn't use it to record, for reasons outside the scope of this post, for live use I've had good results with my mxr dyna comp pedal. It's small, relatively cheap, and sounds good with the Little Phatty. It can suck out too much high-end though, if not set just right.

I am a big fan of Electro Harmonix, you might like to check out the White Finger (FET) and Black Finger (tube) if you are looking for something in pedal form. If you have a really big budget you might want to think about a channel strip like a Universal Audio 6176/LA-610 or something.

Not really sure that any of those can be called 'transparent' though. From my own limited experience i don't know of any analogue compresssors that don't colour the sound in some way or another.

sounds like a dbx 160a would be perfect for you. if you're looking for something more boutique and colorful, the Empirical Labs Distressor compressor is my favorite compressor ever for basically every application, and it's not hard to get it to sound a bit like analog tape compression, but would definitely cover you for more simple duties as well.