so heres a diagram, it represents the signal coming in from a standard guitar.
non compressed....so some of the signal that is represented, would be bass on left to treble on right, when we use procesed range, what ends up happening is you thinken up up the signal, each of those lines represents a frequencey range, and when uncompressed it remains natural where some parts are low and someparts are high and some parts are closer together...like some pups for instance only put out a dynamic range from some hertz to another...even if its rated from like 100hz to 20khz you will still be missing some sections like i left those parts open so you can see, this is just a subjective example...so ill continue... as some of these frequencies aremore prominent than others.....the scale of db gain per frequencey is reflected in teh image i made wich is crude...some parts of the lows have more db and some parts of the mids are lower or higher, and some parts of the highs are high and low in db inscrease.....processed compression takes the signal thickens up the general voltage making the frequencies closer together, removing the gaps or the "non atenuative" sections wich do not respond when u put a signal through compression(this is why using a eq gives u more dynamic range when you compress a signal)
another thing it does, is allows you to LIMIT where all the frequencies max out, so you can bring you db gain per frequencies all up at the same point, so all of those lines relatively become at the same level, warming and thicking up the sound, alsowhen process compression occurs it reduced th available bandwith.....
for instance if you had in number terms this is
if u had a pickup that the signal output of 1 megahertz....and its a regular pickup, but not all of the signal is useable, so when you go to compress it, it aligns the frequencies and basicaly removes the ones that the compression cannot attenuate....so if you had a 1 megahertz signal and drop out the frequencies that the compression does not use it brings the signal to a average 600-800 khz...
im not engineer but im trying to explain this
so when you have a pickup that has only soo much that a compressor can use, you end up with a thinner less dense signal
now natural compression, means that when the signal coming out of the pickup has more of these frequencies and mor db gain per frequencey and also more area that arent "empty" that means the compressor you use on top of that highly compressed signal, gathers the signal source, doesnt drop as many of the frequencies, also boosts what you do have, and has a wider natural bandwoth....less compressed pups require more compression and you get less effect
higher compressed pups require litle to no compression and you get a far greater effect
also what this does is makes all your dynamic notes the same db in response...so if u shred and palmmmute, the output volume is equal to a full strum, or a
pinch harmonics, also makes the same output as a
palm mute...well relatively
this in turn makes it so when you use high gain, and go through notes, with hard definition, they all sound the same, they all go through the compresor the same and leave the same....rather a low gain pup with litle to no compression, ends up spiking he signal between different dynamic notes as you play, like pinches can drive over a compresor wich is normaly set at perfect for palm muting, does this make any sense..???? a high gain pup with tons of compression makes it also so between ur compression and ur noise gate and sitortion, all the signal altering between all the forms(noisegate, eq, compression, distortion) is not as much afected and more organic tone comes in and comes out, rather compressing a low gain pup, noise gating, and then distortion, completely HOLLOWS out the sound
this is a myth when emg stated they have the highest bandwith signal, but they do not, because less then 50 percent of that signal is usable in most cases with emg, compared to passive pups where you can get minumum of 70 percent of usable bandwith on a passive i mighthave some terms messed up but im trying to explain this the right way
basicaly, more compression out of a pup, the thicker and more usable signal you get....but its relative to frequencey db gain per freq section..and those are all relative.......so if u have sections of frequencies where some parts are higher db and some are lower, it will inevidably drop the lower ones compressing the higher ones, leveling them out and thinnign the signal.
hmmm
does this help??
