Compressor Sustainor

What does Compression do?

As you can see in the chart below there are 3 lines. The yellow line is your guitars’ volume without a compressor. The harder you play the strings, the higher the volume (decibels) go. The blue line is the compressors threshold. You can set the threshold to whatever decibel limit you want on the compressor pedal. It creates a barrier that if you play quietly and lightly or harder, it will squish (compress) your loud playing into a more consistent volume. This brings us to the red line. So as you see, this guitar player turned on their compressor. The yellow line is their usual playing, and as they begin to play louder, once their volume crosses the blue threshold it begins to be throttled down to a consistent signal instead of constantly raising in volume. This can be used in music like funk to have volume gain without turning into an over-driven rock sound.