My new toy. (Music geek warning)

Well, life has been crazy for me the last couple of weeks. My wife has gone on maternity leave. I've been asked by a ton of friends to work on their guitars (and even been offered a little scratch for it).
I've been doing a lot of design work for Conspiracy of Thought with their new album cover and surrounding promotional material.

But, in all this madness, I thought I'd talk about a new toy I picked up, because I'm really liking it. I picked up a Rocktron Big Crush compressor pedal. I would link to their site, but when I go to it it demands I install Flash 6 of later, despite the fact that I have Flash 9 installed, which tells me that their Safari support is crappy. (quick note, spell check would prefer I use "crappie", how funny is that? Maybe the British spell it that way.)

I currently have 5 Basses, and I use all of them for various things. Their output is all over the place, with the fretless strangely being the hottest output of all. So, I have been relying on a Digitech BP200 floor unit to give me some control over the family. So over the last 2 years I've come to notice, I've been writing patches for the BP that involved various levels of compression, the volume pedal, and as little coloration as possible. And, more to the point, I have never used a distortion pedal on my bass for any purpose other than to get a laugh out of another musician. And I think the BP has about 5 million distortions built in.

So, it occurs to me, I already have a fantastic volume pedal in the Dunplop High Gain Volume pedal. Surely I could get better results with that and a dedicated compressor than running through a floor rack where the compressor is only one of a ton of effects they tried to cram in there.
In short, I love it, It is very clean and quiet. It tames my thunderous slapping and aggressive plucking, to the point where my more delicate fret work is not lost in the mix. (I know, you are wondering "What delicate playing is he talking about?"). So, while now I am running 2 pedals instead of one, I am carrying a lot less baggage. Not to mention I can no longer accidentally step on the patch pedal and bring up the "cosmic distortion space echo" patch in the middle of an R&B tune.

I may work the BP back into the mix somehow someday, but for now, less really is more.
------

And that's enough for now.

Brian Norwood

Platypi Online: The Platypus Portal