Anyone using the Multiband Comp?

macfly

macfly

Inspired
Upfront let me say that my learning curve has been steep with modeling, and I worry that I don't really have a great ear. So this post may be for people in my boat, and also for pros to help us find this kind of thing, or to suggest other subtle things to try with it.

All that said, in the last few months I've been really happy with my presets, mostly using a BE, Ecstacy blue channel, and JTM45. A trusted soundman/friend mixed us last weekend and said our guitars sounded great but that he could still tell they were digital...I'm assuming it was the other guy who's using a Helix ;)

I had some time this weekend and was learning songs through my studio monitors and felt like I could kinda hear some of that "digital" in my patches. After spending too much time with PEQ and not liking the results, I remembered a video @2112 did about the Multiband Comp, and how it's three comps but also a sort of dynamic eq. I tried it months ago after seeing that video but it pushed my main preset's CPU over 80 and I didn't feel like I was getting any real benefit...but I'll have to admit I didn't really pay attention to how it works.

Yesterday I placed it at the end of the chains in both my BE and Ecstacy presets. After adjusting levels and then comparing to the same preset without the MBC, I found that it not only smoothed out some harshness but also livened up the sound of these two...like the original patches sounded like the were behind a blanket almost. Watching the meters, the comps were not working drastically. I found that the stock settings were great with the BE...I tried tweaking it but coming back to stock always sounded better. One of the mistakes I realize I've made in my guitar modeling journey has been drastic tweaks. With the Bogner, I used very minor tweaks from the stock -30 threshold settings. -33 for low, -32 for mid, and -30.5 for high. It sounds great!

I'm sure there's more sauce to be found in moving the frequencies, ratio, attack and release, but at this point I'm really satisfied and will give this a couple rehearsals and gigs to see if it needs any of that. I'm desperately trying to stay out of the rabbit hole and spend more time playing guitar.

Again sorry if this is a "well duh" post, but it may help someone? Cheers!
 
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Yeah multiband compression earns it's own learning curve lol.

There are two scenarios I use it for.
1) taming the low / low mids for chugging guitar. like around100-250hz
2) taming the high end on my single coil guitars to make it a little smoother. This can be pre or post. But I do like doing it pre gain because it's almost like i'm altering my pickups. Usually I sit around 2k-ish
 
Sounds killer. I tried it on my kitchen sink gig preset and it killed the cpu! I'll have to try on simpler patch. Any issues with that? Probably the dual amp setup.
 
I'm using it on my "kitchen sink," but had to make some choices. The MBC added about 10% CPU, so that put me at 85%. I had two amps and two cabs...kept the amps but reduced to one cab, and dropped the Multiplexer I had switching the amps. I have very little loss of features in the preset and the tone difference is well worth the minor changes.
 
KyleHowdy said:
1) taming the low / low mids for chugging guitar. like around100-250hz
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Yep, I've been using the BE for quite some time and it builds up low end with palm muting generally between E and D. That subtle change from -30 to -33 with the crossover at 120Hz did the trick.
 
macfly said:
Yep, I've been using the BE for quite some time and it builds up low end with palm muting generally between E and D. That subtle change from -30 to -33 with the crossover at 120Hz did the trick.
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Definitely helps get a lot closer to a tight album tone!
 
macfly said:
I'm using it on my "kitchen sink," but had to make some choices. The MBC added about 10% CPU, so that put me at 85%. I had two amps and two cabs...kept the amps but reduced to one cab, and dropped the Multiplexer I had switching the amps. I have very little loss of features in the preset and the tone difference is well worth the minor changes.
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I am going to have to try this. I have the same setup with 2 cabs and mulitplexer. Do you run the amps in series then?
 
Timgo said:
I am going to have to try this. I have the same setup with 2 cabs and mulitplexer. Do you run the amps in series then?
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Yes, but I don't use them at once...sounds like that's what you're doing...just switching between them. If they are on the same channel, the gap is really minimal. Be sure to set Bypass Mode to Mute for both amps.
 
macfly said:
Yes, but I don't use them at once...sounds like that's what you're doing...just switching between them. If they are on the same channel, the gap is really minimal. Be sure to set Bypass Mode to Mute for both amps.
Click to expand...
Awesome, thanks for the help!
 
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