|
(I'm posting this because I was unable to find the answer when I was thinking of building one of these. Maybe it will help someone else.)
I bought the Opti-Comp specifically for the purpose of having a very transparent compression for use with acoustic guitar that has an onboard pre-amp. (As opposed to the squishy chicken-pickin' style compression that's typical in a compressor). It's about PERFECT for acoustic. There is just enough compression at 12 O'Clock that you can tell it's there, but no real squish. You start hearing hints of real squish at 2 or 3 O'Clock. There is not very much obvious boost of low signal, though there is some, so it mostly acts like a limiter. Very subtle and nice with an acoustic.
I would advise socketing the three relevant caps so that you can adjust the voicing a little bit. That would be the input cap, the output cap and the one in the ground leg of the VTL. That'd be C1, C2 and C3. Stock it sounded great, but there was a noticeable change in tone when bypassed (circuit was dropping some of the low end). At first I changed all three caps to .1uF. This worked great and the guitar sounded virtually the same in and out of bypass. It seemed like it was working fine, but just as a limiter - it was lacking the compression attack sound. I decided that I wanted a little for tightness in the bass (to add back some compression sound), but without going back to the stock value. So, I swapped the input cap to .068uF, and that was perfect: Very little change in tone when engaged, but more compression in the tone.
To my ears it was what I wanted, YMMV with your acoustic.
So my advice is that if you are considering this pedal for acoustic, it works great, but I'd advise putting sockets in places where you might change values of components, it makes changes easy. Maybe also socket R10 if you think you might be inclined to to the release mod.
(FWIW, I made the same change in my Classic Delay, which I also built for acoustic guitar use. Input cap is .068uF, output was already 1uF. Sounds great.)
FWIW#2 I added the switch to do the attack mod, but I honestly don't hear a different in the three caps. It could be the result of having changed the voicing of the circuit slightly, or maybe it just doesn't become as evident at more subtle settings and that if I cracked it up I would hear it... But for me, if doing it again, not sure I would bother. Maybe just socket C6 and flavor to taste once.
Hope this might be helpful to someone in the future.
Andre
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
