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Anatomy of Guitar Tone: Swell Compression

Swell Compression [Anatomy of Guitar Tone]
Swell Compression [Anatomy of Guitar Tone]
Transcript
[guitar plays — volume swells]

Today, I’m going to talk about using a compression pedal before a volume pedal. This is a great technique when you’re looking to create atmospheric sound effects.

Sometimes, when I approach atmospheric tones, I will use just a volume pedal into an amp, and I push the amp fairly hard so it’s not completely overdriven, but it starts breaking up. The reason I do this is as I push the volume pedal up, the sound naturally starts to compress.

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Sometimes, this isn’t the best method because as the amp overdrives, it brings out certain harmonics and the sound is a little bit richer than a perfectly clean sound. One of the problems you’ll notice when you’re using a volume pedal or a volume knob on your guitar and you do the swells into a perfectly clean amp — by the time you start riding up the volume, the sound is already pretty heavily decayed, and so you don’t really get a lot of volume out of it.

This is why I put a compression pedal before a volume pedal, and I use a fair amount of compression on it, and what happens is if I have the volume pedal cocked all the way back, I hit the note — the compression pedal is going to grab it, and it’s going to hold on to that for quite a while, so as I’m pushing up the volume pedal, there’s still plenty of clean signal that I can use to push into the amp or the reverb, or in the case that I’m using today, I used a EchoLution pedal from Pigtronix.

For this example, I was using this Keeley compressor. It’s a very simple compression pedal. As you can see, I’ve got it set fairly high. I like it because it’s very simple, and it has almost a little bit of a Teletronix LA2A quality to it, which I prefer as opposed to a super clean compression.

Any sort of compression pedal will really work for this. It’s not so much about the color, but about how it’s grabbing the signal.

I was also using this Ernie Ball VP Junior Volume Pedal. It’s a pretty standard volume pedal. The last thing in my signal chain is this Pigtronix EchoLution 2 Ultra Pro.

I just used this to get a little bit more decay out of the notes. I had it set to a fairly slow — it was like a quarter note delay. That way, when I swell it in, you hear when I attack the note, but when I swell in, you don’t. It just extends the length of the note.

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Mark Marshall

Mark Marshall is a producer, songwriter, session musician and instructor based in NYC. More at guitaristmarkmarshall.com