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Carl Martin Compressor/Limiter has been specially developed to incorporate the same features and sonic clarity found in high quality professional studio compressors. To achieve this we incorporated a variable threshold, -variable compression ratio, -variable attack and release controls and of course, a gain level.

General Guidelines on the use of the Compressor/Limiter:
Threshold: Working anti clockwise, determines how much of the signal will be compressed. This is also dependent on how much signal is fed from the instrument.
Comp: Working clockwise, determines how much compression is applied to the signal allowed by the threshold setting.
Resp: Working clockwise, determines the attack/release times, going from slow to fast. In general, if you want to hear the compressor working with a crisp attack you should use slow times. If you require just a silent limiting you should use fast times.
Gain: Working clockwise, sets the overall gain.
Busy: Indicates the amount of compression being applied, even in bypass mode. The brighter it gets, the more compression is being applied.

_One day while Carl was adding some compression to a guitar track in his studio, he thought, why hasn’t anyone built a small opto-compressor for guitarists?  An optical compressor performs gain reduction control via a light source into a photo sensitive cell... as the light source gets brighter, the photo sensitive cell sends a signal to reduce dynamic range, or what becomes a compressed signal.  Welcome to the Vintage Opto-Compressor….an old-school compressor from the days where colouring was an important factor to the sound.  The four controls (from left to right) are the Gain, which controls the ‘pre-glow’ of the optical circuit (the more you turn this up, the fatter the sound); Level, which controls the overall volume of the compressor; Compression, which controls how hard or soft the compression is, and the Attack control which takes the signal from transparent to outright total squeeze.  A short time with this compressor will allow you to find some of those classic guitar sounds which may somehow have escaped you before.  Again, like all the Vintage pedals, the Opto-Compressor comes in a solid diecast housing with cool chicken-head knobs, CM colour and graphics and a 9v battery compartment.  Due to the nature of compressors, we highly recommend a regulated power supply (like the CM Big John and Pro Power) or a large stock of batteries…..