Compressors and Noise Gates

[Crandles]

I'm looking into getting a compressor and/or a noise gate and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions as to which ones to check out.

[brandondrury]

It totally depends on your situation. I owned a Presonus ACP88 compressor for years, but it just collected dust. After a while, I just took it out of my rack. While the concept of some kick ass, classic compressors like 1176s or LA-Xa's sounds pretty awesome, I've had pretty good luck with the plugin stuff.

If you are just learning, I think plugins are a must simply because your "experimenting" is non permanent. Of course, I'm assuming you are working on a computer recording rig of some kind.

What are you looking to compress?

What are you wanting to use the gate for?

Brandon

[Crandles]

Actually I don't really need the compressor, it's now just a noise gate I'm looking for. I want to get rid of the hum and other noise produced on my amp when I'm not playing. If it was a computer recording rig I would experiment a lot but I'm looking for an actuall pedal.

[dach]

There are pedals for that... but I'm not really familiar with them... if you are having lots of noise from your amp, i'd probably want to fix it at the source... ie: pickup cavity not sheilded, cables, settings, etc... some noise is to be expected but "normally" it shouldn't be considerable... hum means you most likely need to fix some grounding/sheilding issues... better to do that in the long run than purchase a $150 tone sucking band-aid...

[brandondrury]

My fault. I just realized this was the guitar forum. I was giving recording advice.

Dach is right. Most of the time excessive noise and hum are caused by problems in the guitar. You want to look at this first, for sure.

$150 tone sucking band-aid...

;D That pretty much sums it up...AMAZINGLY WELL, I might add.

If you just want to get the noise taken care of and don't mind losing the tone, the Boss NS-1 seams to be pretty good. I used to use it back in the day. I actually have one, but I haven't used it since I started recording. I don't remember any tonal impact, but I was a lot younger and equally dumb back when I was using it.

Brandon

[Crandles]

Well I'm young and dumb so I'll check it out and give it a whirl.