How Do I Use Compressor Pedals? | Keeley Compressor Mini

hmm [Music] [Music] [Music] all right guys how you doing it's your beer i hope you're all good so years ago maybe three or four years ago i did a video called how to use compressor pedals where i was using the keeley compressor plus and that that video the purpose of that was to shed a bit of light on how to use a compressor some people get it some people didn't it's actually one of my most viewed videos which is pretty cool in any case the reason i bring this up is because in this video i wanted to shed a little bit of light on my favorite uses for compression but on top of that i wanted to take this opportunity to show you guys a new compressor from keeley electronics if any of you are a fan of robert keely or keeley electronics and you know about the company then you would know that this month being september 2021 marks 20 years of keeley electronics which is amazing or at least it's 20 years anniversary of keely being known in the guitar industry modding pedals creating different pedals and doing all that kind of stuff so a huge congratulations to robert and his team uh that's really really cool 20 years is a long time to be killing it in the game and you're doing just that so my sincere congratulations to you so the pedal i'm talking about in this video is the brand new keyley compressor mini as you can see it's this tiny tiny little two knob compressor pedal it's so small if you've got a tc electronic mimic it's the same footprint as that as tiny little all the tone city pedals it's so small some pedals have attack release times ratio threshold all this kind of stuff that for most people it's going to be like oh my god that's too complicated i don't know what they're on about i don't know how to use this pedal it's just annoying me i'm not going to bother but you don't want to be like that you don't want to miss out on the beauty of compression especially not when you're using it in certain guitar tones which i'm going to show you in this video so what's the idea with the compressor mini well essentially it's their simplest but most effective compressor that they've made they've done all the maths and all the hard thinking for you under the hood of this pedal so you can just turn up the level turn up the compression and you get a nice quality of sound and a nice sounding compression i'm just going to read you a little bit of info off the leaflet that came with the pedal just so you can have an idea of what they're aiming for here but the next generation of kila compression is finally here the all-new kila compressor mini is designed to make the magic of compression simple and easy to use featuring an automatic manhattan style compression that articulates a transparent blend of your dynamic guitar signal the kilimini is now the best compressor for small guitar effects pedal boards the keeley mini compressor retains all of the subtlety and dynamics in your playing while making it easier to play but anyway i've talked enough about a two knob pedal we're going to just put it on the board i'm going to play it with a strat and i'm going to show you a few different applications for compression that i've come to use over the years just to say guys this is a sponsored video keeley have sent the kilo compressor mini over for me to check out and usually i'd do like a gear demo take you through it but with it being such a simple pedal i wanted to sort of give you guys a different example of how i'd use the compressor within my rig and all that kind of stuff so yes this is a sponsored video i'll leave my opinions to the end but i just wanted to let you guys know okay so i've got my guitar let me give you the rig real quick running into this pedal board we've got the uafx got the astra up front we got the starlight and the golden reverberate in the loop got uh origin effects revival draft so that can give you a demonstration of how to use that with compression and the microcosm's on there because it's fun i'm running into the soldano slo-100 into the soil reactive ir that's going into logic and i'm running an instance of the soldano slo100 plug-in just for the cab section from neural dsp so that is the rig as you can see on the pedal board i've got the compressor mini in terms of where the guitar goes first it hits the origin revival drive and then it goes into the compressor mini because i wanted to have that compression after the fact okay so let's start by showing you my first application for compression as you can see the way i've got the compressor set is that i'm backing off some level and i'm boosting the compression over halfway that's going to be a little more bloomy but it really works when you're running it on like a on a clean or a push clean like this [Music] so you can hear that it's it's it's a nice sound but it's i guess you'd say there's a little bit of a transient going on when i say transient i mean it's a little spiky [Music] as soon as i throw on the compressor [Music] so if you noticed there was a big volume jump but on top of that because we're running it on a crunch channel or like a it's a gain stage so the harmonic content is there if we're not driving the amplifier hard enough with the guitar itself you're not going to hear that crunch so just to give you an example again [Music] it's nice but when you put the compression on it because i'm boosting the compression we're bringing those high and low transients together and it's going to pull up the information pull it out so that's where you start hearing that crunch so really what i'm trying to say here is my first initial use of compression generally speaking is i find the crunch channel i run the crunch low-ish so it's got a glassy cleanness to it but we're still we have all that harmonic content from the crunch channel then i use a compressor to bring it all together so you get that so case in point [Music] basically i really like using it to just bring out a bit more of the harmonic content within that channel like it's it's more telling on the bridge pickup so without it [Applause] [Music] it's very clean throw on that compression [Music] which i think really works it just it makes it easy to play because it's pulling everything together now you can accentuate this more by just boosting the level of touch [Applause] so [Music] so hopefully that gets the point across about the first application i like to use with compression and again this is really easy just literally turning the compressor in the level and finding that sweet spot so that's cool so the next use of compression for me is blending it with a drive pedal i put it after the drive pedal so in this instance the revival drive and the reason i do this is gain is essentially compression it's compression of the signal alongside a lot of other stuff but compression is a big part of it you know that's why it's easy to play with more games everything is just so compressed everything feels really fluid and nice so you can take a sound like this drive sound i've got [Applause] [Music] i like that for crunch now if i wanted to start playing with lead and i want a little bit more fluidity bring it out make it a bit more bold add more gain essentially i'm going to compress it so rather than changing the gain and changing the settings of the pedal i can throw the compressor on top of this and i'll get more sort of gain compression might be a bit easier to play more sustained so check it out [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] um [Music] if i take it off do a similar kind of thing you lose a little bit of this body a bit of this warmth and bloom [Music] what i might do at this point for playing like that is back off the compression just a little bit [Music] good [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so you can clearly hear how it it it just kind of works you know it just adds something else to the sound that i really appreciate and it's not always necessary i find it's nice when you're playing on your own uh especially when you're playing on your own just gives you a little bit more support um this kind of thing can get a little bit messy live where you know when we're in a studio environment like this it sounds really nice and controlled and it's adding more vibe to everything but that can also be a bit of a nuisance live uh by adding more gain and more intensity to the sound so you always want to just manage that so ride that compression as you see fit obviously one of the most fun things to do with the compressor is just to gun the compression so you get that natural bloom and then sort of chunk on some funk in position four so this is without it [Music] do [Music] um [Music] just makes things easier you know like if i take it away all those little nuances like you hear it but just not as nicely because you know you're really hearing the transients whereas when you throw it on you don't have to do as much but [Music] all this stuff [Music] you know you really don't have to play that much and it brings it out so yeah that's generally one of the more traditional sense for using compression that was a little bonus use because i don't really do a lot of that stuff but um it's a very obvious way to use compressor all right so now we're on to my kind of third favorite use for compression just to recap my first uh favorite use would be take a crunch channel really low gain and then use a compressor to boost the level and pull the harmonic content closer together so you get a little bit of hair and the glass out of that tone because i never really use exclusively clean channels i tend to clean up a crunch and then boost uh and compress to get that sort of sound and it is really enjoyable for that purpose the second use would be to take something like a drive pedal or if you're using a crunch channel uh and then and then using the compressor to essentially get sort two channels out of the drive pedal if that makes sense the first one being like a crunch less saturated less sustained sort of crunch sound in this instance the origin revival drive compact then i used the compressor to sort of boost that but also pull it together and i put it after the drive because what it does is it brings everything closer together again in the same way that i do with with the crunch channel running at low gain gives me more support gives more body to the sound you hear more of the sizzle at the top end generally it just sounds like a gain boost and a nice fat gain boost in in a tasteful way it it generally tends to work with any drive pedal i've tried it with so put it afterwards and then find your nice sound with your drive and then get that afterwards so it does work it sounds really nice then my little bonus tip of course would just be to gun the compression go on to position four on a strat or something and play that funky stuff the cleaner the channel and the amp the closer to that authentic funk chunk sound you're gonna get and now onto my sort of third and final favorite use for this so this is where i use a high gain channel again i'm still using the strat but the idea being here you take a high gain sound that's really good for rhythm and high gain so it's not too too much gain and then you use the compressor to get that extra bit again and sustain it's all similar principles to the other ones but i'll just show you how it sounds so this is just the overdrive channel of the sultana without the compressor on just to bear in mind we've got the reverb delay in the loop [Applause] [Music] [Music] so it's a nice sounding game really it's got a lot of sizzle which i really like but if i want to go and hold notes for a little bit longer [Music] [Music] ah [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so i was just kind of playing around a similar kind of thing just to show you audibly what's going on there as you can hear you know we've got loads of gain and the channel is fairly compressed as it is but using the compressor you get more sustain uh it's a little bit easier like you hear the nuances more it doesn't give you loads more gain but it just gives you like a more excited version of the sound that you already heard before and that's just really useful not always do we have to throw on boosts sometimes it's literally just a feel thing because sometimes you'll put a boost you know usually you should put a boost in in the loop so that it actually boosts the power section so you become louder if you put a boost in front of the amp it's just going to boost level into the input so it's going to give you more gain which some people like you know but that's the same you know you're boosting the signal so you're going to end up with more gain coming to the front what i like about this is we're not necessarily adding more gain we're just sort of messing with what's already there to try and give us more out of it if that makes sense this could all be just random theories of my own but i feel like that's a really nice way of using compression on high gain you know it can get a little messy and it can often induce feedback you know especially when using a single core guitar and you sat this close to an amp that's currently running at half volume and it's 100 watts so that's pretty intense but in any case it's a really nice use for it that was with as you can see the controls there that the compression's more i've backed off the level because i'm compressing the high gain so much so i don't want to be adding loads of level getting getting too much noise essentially so yeah i think that's a really nice use for it too all right then well that kind of sums up my top three go-to uses for compression firstly i want to talk about the compressor real quick i love the kilo compressors i've used the kilo compressor plus for many years on my pedalboard and it goes without saying that everybody knows tequila compressor does a really really good job so the idea of bringing out the compressor mini on that 20-year anniversary is a really nice touch and a really really great pedal to be fair it's it's so simple and it does the kind of compression effect that i want it delivers and this is the first time i've used it i just assumed that it would do a similar thing to the compressor plus which it does but it's much simpler and easier to use and it's tiny as well so it takes up no space on your pedalboard so thank you to keely for sending me the compressor mini to show you guys um but yeah basically that sums up my my go-to uses for compression i love compressing a really low gain crunch channel i like using it uh to i guess over saturate a drive pedal so i put it after the drive pedal choose my settings where i want them for like my crunch and stuff and if i want a bit more balls and a bit more girth and sustain out of it turn the compressor on for that putting in front of a high gain sound not to get more gain but to give me more sustain out the sound and excite the whole sound a little bit more especially for lead or more intricate riffs and stuff it's a really handy thing to do the last thing i wanted to say about compression just before i end this video is that you don't want to overuse it it's too much of a good thing not necessarily from what people are hearing but it can make you complacent with you playing because it's the same way when you use a lot of gain when you use a lot of gain it's a lot of compression so you don't have to do very much here or here to get the the desired effect which is cool if you're into that but i i like to dig in and get get the guitar and the amp working harder so if i'm using compression all the time it's kind of doing a lot of that heavy lifting for me so i use it as a stylistic tool and one that you know some days it really is enjoyable playing with that amount of compression and other days i'm like oh it's way too compressed i need more air i need more space between everything so hopefully that makes a bit of sense a little bit of insight into what i think about it thank you keeley electronics for sending me the compressor mini and a huge congratulations on 20 years that is that is outstandingly awesome so yeah congrats from me uh thank you guys for watching this video let me know what you think in the comments section of course i'll link everything in the description box but let me know how you use compression and what you think of this video in any case like subscribe and share i've been revere and i'll see you all very soon [Music] all right [Music] you

Channel: Rabea Massaad

Views: 26,732

Keywords: rabea, afro, massaad, toska, dorje, music, guitar, victory, chapman, guitars, chappers, rob, andertons, musicisum, shred, solo, band, live, fender, gibson, lesson, top, 10, lick, how, to, play, sweep, picking, steve, via, nuno, bettencourt, hero, guitarhero3, frogleap, studios, Keeley electronics, Compressor mini, Keeley compressor mini, Robert keeley

Id: GmxbnRpRbqs

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021