MOZZTRONICS CO-4K FET COMP PEDAL - NO/PS

AMAZING AUSTRALIAN MADE PEDALS

We’re going back to the 80s with this one.

I was reading about the happy accident discovered and used by Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel, with a certain Solid State mixing console and their 82B33 “listen mic” limiter. The listen mic is a mic placed in the live room so musicians can talk back to the control room. Due to the wide variation in volumes on this mic the desk had a very fast hard limiter so as not to slam the control room speakers if the drummer suddenly hit a drum. So, during one session, the engineer accidentally left this on during recording and got a “huge” drum sound in the control room but the sound wasn’t there on playback. They eventually worked out it was this listen mic limiter providing the magic. Many people modified their desks so they could use this “listen mic limiter” on things other than just the listen mic, and the rest is history.

So i took that limiter circuit and added my own tweaks. I added a control for compression ratio so it could act more like a compressor as well as a limiter, and i added a dry blend (parallel compression, an old studio trick). As per the original circuit i use a FET transistor for the compression.

Turn up the volume to use this as a compressor / sustainer / boost too !

I took the first pedal to Dr D, my captive studio engineer, and we used in as an insert of various tracks of a multi track recording. The first time Dr D used it he had the biggest grin on his face, which stayed for the whole testing session. On this recording Dr D used a room mic when recording drums, as well as close micing. The room mic was 50 feet away, upstairs in a bathroom. We put the CO4K on this room mic track, brought up the fader on the desk & the drums sprang to life. We tried it on snares, toms, kick, bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, vocals… On most things it improved the sound and brought it forward in the mix, different instruments required different settings on the CO4K, including adding the dry signal with the wet compressed signal.

Dr D like this so much, he asked me to make him a rack version, 4 channel, with linking between channel pairs and some other features. I am working on this now.

But this is not just a studio tool. You can run this before your drive pedals to get an even drive character, or run it after your drives, to boost the signal going to your amp.

This is designed to be full range so works equally as well on guitar and bass, and it has big internal headroom so you can also use it on synths.

Video coming soon.

Mozztronics uses the industry standard Boss style 2.1mm center negative 9V DC socket for the power supply connection.