What kind of compressor for for the vintage dbx 160 in 28.02?

Hamsworld

Hamsworld

Inspired
Can you help me with this? I had a lot of fun in the last week with 80´s racktones when I bought this preset. But it needs some updates.
 
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FWIW, back in The Day (and yes, I’m old enough to remember) we would place an 1176 limiter (20:1 ratio, with a high threshold and the fastest attack/release possible so it only reacted to the tippy-top peaks) and put that directly in front of a 160 with a low-ish threshold and 4:1 ratio — the idea being that the 1176 prevented hot peaks from hitting the 160 detector circuit (so it would keep the 160 from gagging) while the 160 maintained a fairly solid level of gain control/sustain. Requires a little fiddling to get it right, but that’s what an AFX is for, yes?
 
touch33 said:
FWIW, back in The Day (and yes, I’m old enough to remember) we would place an 1176 limiter (20:1 ratio, with a high threshold and the fastest attack/release possible so it only reacted to the tippy-top peaks) and put that directly in front of a 160 with a low-ish threshold and 4:1 ratio — the idea being that the 1176 prevented hot peaks from hitting the 160 detector circuit (so it would keep the 160 from gagging) while the 160 maintained a fairly solid level of gain control/sustain. Requires a little fiddling to get it right, but that’s what an AFX is for, yes?
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Bass guitars can have such a huge dynamic range. A whisper to thunder. I use a similar tactic on the bass when we play live. I have our bass player setup his compressor pedal with it's fastest attack/release, pretty high ratio, and a high threshold, to just catch when he really digs in. Then a mild compression on his channel of our digital mixer.

I've been trying to get him to get an FM3. But he is just not tech savvy enough, and has absolutely no interest in learning. He has a few pedals going into a SansAmp, then going direct. Which he loves. And so does his back.
 
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If you find the vca compressor either getting not enough grab on the peaks or getting overwhelmed by the bottom end, then why perform historical half measures when the proper tool for the job exists in the Fractal universe?

Use the multiband compressor. You can set the grab in the frequency band where transients occur. You can set the low end band so that it is not a pumping, farty mess.

In this day and age, chaining compressors together is like hammering nails with a boot heel because that's how it was done in grand pappy's day.
 
dr bonkers said:
In this day and age, chaining compressors together is like hammering nails with a boot heel because that's how it was done in grand pappy's day.
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In this day and age it is also possible to condescendingly miss a salient point: the idea behind putting a full-frequency limiter in front of a full-frequency compressor is that you’re not inserting crossover/phase anomalies and tonal variations where they’re not useful. Sometimes grand-pappy’s “historical half-measures” actually works better AND is easier to implement.
 
touch33 said:
In this day and age it is also possible to condescendingly miss a salient point: the idea behind putting a full-frequency limiter in front of a full-frequency compressor is that you’re not inserting crossover/phase anomalies and tonal variations where they’re not useful. Sometimes grand-pappy’s “historical half-measures” actually works better AND is easier to implement.
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We agree to disagree. If you are using amp tone controls or eq anyway, you are introducing phase shift anyway.

I wasn't being condescending, just giving a different perspective so you are not juggling two compressor block settings rather one block's settings.
 
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