I was at the NAMM show this past weekend. It was a great show overall. Much less crowded than previous years and way fewer artist signings and things like that crowding up the floor. I ended the weekend with probably my most exciting and unexpected NAMM moment ever though…
Yeah! I got a compressor straight from the hands of Robert Keeley himself! I dropped by the booth hoping to try out the Memphis Sun. They didn’t have any there, but they did have the Compressor+, which had recently caught my eye online.
I’ve had the Keeley 2 knob compressor on my board for years. However, when I got my Delta King, I started noticing that it was hitting the compressor way too hard. No matter what I did, the compressor would just crush my sound and never let up. It’s a common issue with humbuckers or active pickups and compressors, but that guitar rendered my Keeley pretty much useless. I need a nice, spanky, compressed tone for the Copy Cats… Basically, I needed a different compressor or a different guitar.
After talking to Robert a bit, he affirmed that the Compressor+ was designed to address exactly the problem I was having. The toggle in the middle switches between single coil and humbucker modes. Single coil mode behaves like the old 2 knob, but when you flip over to humbucker mode it eases up a bit. I’m not sure if it raises the threshold where the compressor kicks in, lowers the input gain a little, or what… But it works! Check out the video for a comparison between how the 2 knob handles humbuckers compared to the Compressor+.
In addition to the single coil / humbucker modes, the Compressor+ also has a tone and blend knob. Both behave as you would expect. The tone brings in some extra brightness and the blend is a simple wet/dry mix (a really clever addition to a compressor that I’ve not seen in a pedal before). The big feature is the toggle switch though. If you’re a humbucker player, but like those classic single coil humbucker sounds, the Compressor+ is worth a shot.