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.
FairFax