When Empress released the original Compressor back in 2011, it quickly became a favourite among guitar and bass players alike who were searching for something more than the typical oversimplified controls found on most compressor pedals. Although our original Compressor sounded great on bass (and still does!) we set out to do even better.

On top of the full range of features and controls normally only seen in high end studio equipment, such as input and gain reduction metering, independent attack and release controls, a mix knob for parallel compression, and an external sidechain insert, we’ve now added a fully variable sidechain high pass filter, and a two position ‘tone + colour’ circuit which adds gentle tone sculpting and harmonic distortion, giving your bass some delicious character.

Bass compressor has a fully adjustable sidechain hpf on a pot. It filters from 20Hz to 400Hz. MKII comp has just two preset hpf frequencies. The sidechain hpf is super useful for instruments that have a lot of low frequency information, such as a bass, to be able to level out high notes that pop out but at the same time not completely squash all your low end. Making it fully adjustable lets you dial it in more precisely. I’d say the hpf is much less crucial on guitar, arguably the whole reason it’s even in the mkII comp is to make it more bass friendly.

Bass compressor has a “Tone + Colour” switch instead of the tone knob in the MKII. It has two preset eq curves that were crafted with bass in mind. One is a mid scoop centered around 300Hz and slight low freq boost, the other is a mid boost centered at 2kHz. The boost helps bring out string and pick attack and sounds nice and aggressive, and the scoop clears up mud and has a bit of a rounder, warmer tone and just makes everything sound better imo! The tone knob on the mkii compressor is a tilt eq which is great for guitar but doesn’t really work well for bass because turning it up removes your low end, and turning it down makes a bass sound really muffled.

The Colour circuit is engaged when you put one of the eq curves on. It’s a very mild clipping circuit that just adds in a bit of harmonic distortion. It’s heavily filtered to sound good with bass. It actually sounds great with guitar too, but we needed something to make the bass comp extra special! It does add a bit of volume boost when it’s engaged, so we gave the option to turn the colour circuit off on either, or both of the eq shapes (there’s an internal dip switch) in case somebody still wants to use the eq shapes but wants the sound to stay super clean.

The Bass compressor has a slightly extended low frequency response, most noticeable with low compression (input knob set low) settings. So no matter how it’s set, it extends all the way down to 20Hz