Mozztronics CO-4K FET Compressor/Limiter

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Peerless Music is proud to be an authorised dealer for Mozztronics: Effects pedals for guitar and bass, hand made in Australia by electrical engineer and musician Andrew Macdonald.

CO-4K COMPRESSOR/LIMITER

DESCRIPTION FROM MOZZTRONICS:

We’re going back to the 80s with this one.

I was reading about the happy accident discovered and used by Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel, with a certain Solid State mixing console and their 82B33 “listen mic” limiter. The listen mic is a mic placed in the live room so musicians can talk back to the control room. Due to the wide variation in volumes on this mic the desk had a very fast hard limiter so as not to slam the control room speakers if the drummer suddenly hit a drum. So, during one session, the engineer accidentally left this on during recording and got a “huge” drum sound in the control room but the sound wasn’t there on playback. They eventually worked out it was this listen mic limiter providing the magic. Many people modified their desks so they could use this “listen mic limiter” on things other than just the listen mic, and the rest is history.

So i took that limiter circuit and added my own tweaks. I added a control for compression ratio so it could act more like a compressor as well as a limiter, and i added a dry blend (parallel compression, an old studio trick). As per the original circuit i use a FET transistor for the compression.

Turn up the volume to use this as a compressor / sustainer / boost too !

But this is not just a studio tool. You can run this before your drive pedals to get an even drive character, or run it after your drives, to boost the signal going to your amp.

This is designed to be full range so works equally as well on guitar and bass, and it has big internal headroom so you can also use it on synths.

INSTRUCTIONS

WET is the volume for the compressor signal

DRY adds the raw uncompressed signal in with the compressed signal to retain some of the dynamics (this is an old studio trick called parallel compression & we’ve built it into the pedal)

RATIO controls the amount of compression from barely on to hard limiting.

Start with all controls anticlockwise. Bring up the WET control for equal volume between effect on & bypass, then bring RATIO up to the desired level. You may need to increase the WET control as adding compression will reduce the volume.

Now let’s have some fun, slowly turn DRY up to add in some of the original signal and regain some of the dynamics lost with compression.

Personally, I prefer lower Ratio settings, a little “subtle” compression wins all the time for me, but there are no hard & fast rules, whatever works for you is good. Turn the RATIO up high to get that classic Byrds 12 string jangly sound. The Byrds used extreme compression on their 12 string guitars to get “that” sound they are known and loved for.

We named this pedal after an Australian Bird, the Magpie, as an obscure reference to the Byrds.