The best compressor for bass guitar

It’s a terrible thing to be misled, to be lured into reading a blog or watching a video that fails to deliver.

But here’s the thing .. there is no best compressor for bass guitar. And what’s more there never has been and never will be.

Ask yourself this question .. do you often wonder how certain sounds in a mix you admire were achieved? Yes? We do too. It’s natural.

Now ask yourself this .. do you want to copy others and repeat what’s gone before? Unless you’re in a tribute act, probably not.

So here’s another thing. Unless we are trying to copy, there is no good or bad gear, right or wrong way.

It’s not the gear .. it’s all about the decisions we make.

We can buy the exact same gear as our heroes and we still won’t sound like them. The best we’ll get is a poor facsimile. Why? Because we’re not them, our perceptions are different and so are our decision making processes.

That’s why the Project Studio Handbook videos express no opinions on best practice. They simply seek to equip us with some technical information that will help us understand the operation and use of the equipment that is available to us.

We should never be made to feel that the equipment we have is inferior. Everything we own is technically superior to everything that was available to music makers during the heyday of the music industry between 1965 and 1995 when many of the greatest records were made.

Our ideas and decisions may be inferior, but not the gear. All we have to do is develop our ability to think laterally and come up with new ideas, make better decisions, and find out what our equipment can do and how to use it.

Does anyone seriously think that upgrading from a cost effective analogue to digital convertor to a top of the range model is going to make our music better, or have any significant effect on the sonics of our recordings? The decisions we make are far more important.

So we try everything. We use whatever gear is available, try it out and use our ears to decide if we like what we hear.

(For the record, we have been using a DBX160a to compress bass this week and we love it!)

Thanks for reading.
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eBay spares or repairs top tips

If you are primarily a musician, composer or producer, it may never have occurred to you that even without specialist electronics technical know-how, you too can repair equipment.

You may have some faulty gear on a shelf, or have seen something on ebay that has some minor faults. Many faults have obvious fixes and providing you are patient, can use a soldering iron and de-soldering tool, you may be able to bring a piece of gear back to life for very little cost.

Here's our top tips:

1) If you see a piece of gear on eBay listed as spares or repairs with a clear diagnosis of the fault in its description, phone the manufactures spares department and request a service manual. They will usually email you a PDF. Identify the parts then phone them and ask if they have them in stock, and how much they are.

2) Consider buying 2 identical devices with different faults, and creating one good unit from them.

3) Use your smartphone to take photos of the device as you dismantle it.

4) It's surprisingly easy to re-spray a case that is scratched. Satin finish black car paint works well and you can mask off areas with insulation or masking tape.

5) Although some parts will be specially designed and manufactured, such as ICs, many other are standard (such as resistors, potentiometers and capacitors) and can be bought from any electronics component supplier.

6) Some faults cannot easily be repaired so don't invest too much money in your repair unless you are certain it will succeed. Even if you can't repair the device, chances are there will be someone else willing to buy it for their own repair project.

Thanks for reading
FairFax