Guitar Gear

I’ve been searching for a decent compression/sustainer for a long time, and I’ve tried out a bunch over the last year. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t until recently that I decided to check out the MXR DynaComp. The DynaComp has been around for a long time, and has several faithful followers. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. It’s not that this is a bad pedal – it’s pretty rugged, very simple to use, but it just doesn’t have what I need for the type of music that I play, which at the moment is bluesy and I use minimal overdrive. But I digress. This won’t be a long review. I’ll just give you my assessment…

I tried this out with a LP Double Cutaway and an American Standard Strat. For amps, I used a Fender Twin Reverb and a Marshal JCM 600 combo. Here’s what I found:

For clean playing, if you want a transparent box, this is not the box for you. It colors your tone quite a bit, even at lower compression levels. This is okay, if that’s your aim, but for me, since I prefer a bright sound, the amount of squeeze with this box was just too much for my tastes (though my dad who was with me liked how it sounded with the LP DC running clean through the Fender Twin). On the positive side, there was lots of headroom with this pedal, and no noticeable signal noise unless I cranked the intensity.

Where this box did shine was with the JCM in the high gain stage. The DynaComp really added a nice level of definition when used with heavy distortion (Note: my dad’s 75 year old ears couldn’t take the loud distortion so he waited outside the sound room :)). That was something I really dug about this box. The JCM 600 is one of those Marshall classics that has lots of crunch. The DynaComp smoothed that out a bit, but didn’t ruin the tone in the process. Nice.

Overall, this is a nice pedal if you regularly play in overdrive mode. But as I said, if you’re looking for a transparent compressor to use in your clean channel, I’d look elsewhere.