\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWith bass guitar, though, there is a huge amount of low end present in the signal. Furthermore, this low end is consistently louder than the other parts of the signal that contain information about how hard you\u2019re playing. When this bottom-heavy signal shows up at the sidechain input, the compressor simply thinks \u201cwow, this is <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> really loud, so I need to compress <\/span>everything<\/span><\/i>\u201d. The result of this is that your bass sound gets indiscriminately compressed, with your playing dynamics and articulation getting lost in the process.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut you can\u2019t really blame your compressor. The poor thing can\u2019t hear whether you\u2019re playing softly with your thumb or digging in with a pick. It\u2019s too busy listening to that ever-present low-end information. We <\/span>could<\/span><\/i> try and combat this by just turning down the amount of compression but that wouldn\u2019t quite solve the problem \u2013 you wouldn\u2019t have those high compression levels when you really need them. The best solution is to remove low frequencies from the sidechain.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nJust to be clear, the actual signal path stays full-range, meaning that all your bottom end will be there at the compressor\u2019s output, it just won\u2019t be <\/span>reacting<\/span><\/i> to it. Also, any compression that is applied will still apply to the whole signal \u2013 there\u2019s no multiband funny business going on here. All that\u2019s happening is that the low frequencies are being filtered out of the sidechain, allowing high frequencies to pass through (High-Pass Filter, remember?). This means that the sidechain can now ignore all that low stuff that causes excessive compression, instead concentrating on whether you\u2019re sitting back in the pocket or slapping away like your gig depends on it!<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBecause the sidechain is now free to \u201clisten to\u201d these more important, high frequency parts of your sound, you\u2019ll have a compressor that is much more responsive to the dynamics in your playing, even with higher levels of compression. It will compress harder when you play harder and vice versa, instead of fighting with your compressor for articulation.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOf course, there\u2019s nothing wrong with excessive compression on bass. In fact, we rather like it \u2013 that\u2019s why we made this High-Pass Filter variable from the Compact Bass\u2019s HPF knob. As you turn it up, you\u2019re increasingly freeing the sidechain from more and more overwhelming low end, breathing valuable dynamics back into your compressed bass tone.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBass players, eh? Don\u2019t say we ain\u2019t good to you!<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Origin Effects is anything approaching a household name among the guitar community, it\u2019s because of compression. We like to think we know a fair bit about it and our Cali76 compressor pedals are popular enough to suggest that we do. But let\u2019s not overlook one crucial element to that popularity: bass players!\u00a0 Yep, bass…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1080,"featured_media":8739,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8738"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1080"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8738"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8752,"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8738\/revisions\/8752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origineffects.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}