One of the most versatile compressors on the market is one designed by David Derr called the EL8 Distressor Compressor. It's the kind of compressor that can be really clean and gentle and warm and transparent. But if you want it to be vicious, there is no compressor that I know of that can get you up to 40 dB of compression, which is what it might take to get something really wicked. I always tell people to buy three, because you're going to end up using two of them in stereo and you're going to use that third one for bass or vocal or whatever.

With this unit's ability to get 40 dB of compression, you can take a regular lousy snare drum and turn it into a John Bonham kind of snare. What that means is that if you want to create your own reverb without reverb, you can! You can absolutely pull the "room" out of your snare drum. You take the snare drum, or whatever sound you are working on, and sub-group or mult it to two channels. On the first channel, the dry or source channel, apply more gentle compression with a slow attack. By "gentle" I mean around 5 to 10 dB of compression, which is a lot on other compressors, but not on this one. The resulting sound will be this smack or really hard sound. The higher numbers on the attack knob are slower. Now, on the second channel crank the compression up to 40 dB with a very fast attack and release. When you completely remove the attack, it brings up the room ambience. So now you've got this one sound with a horrendous attack punchiness to it, and another sound that captures the room reverb. You mix in the one where all the attack has been removed, you bring that up with the first fader, and you have a natural room without any reverbs, yet you hear the reverb from the snare. By the use of your compressors, you are creating your own reverb.

Now, if you are going to put in 40 dB of compression, you are going to want to crank the output gain up to make up for this extreme compression. When you crank up the output, it just becomes a different animal. That is a key function of this. With the Distressor Compressor, you won't get any buzzing or humming or crapping out. It's amazing.

The Distressor Compressor also really does a great job on vocals. It has this setting, which I guess is a midband emphasis setting, that is really designed for vocals that get thin and harsh and hurt your ears and cause you to EQ that section every time they get into that range. When you hit this setting, it automatically attenuates that area and warms it up, so you have this warm vocal all the way to the top of the range, where normally it would get very harsh. If you are dealing with a really thin voice, you can also add this DIST2 harmonic distortion setting, and it adds warmth and a little fuzz to the vocal. Depending on the application, it just sounds great.

Here is another idea, this one based on the 1176. It is called the British Setting. If you are familiar with the 1176, you basically have two knobs, an in and an out, and you have four buttons. With those four buttons, you can select your compression ratio. What you do is press them all in. Depending on the vintage of the unit, because you can't do this on some of the newer 1176s, hitting these four buttons makes it freak. The compressor needle, or indicator, will slam over to the right. Normally, whenever there is anything going on, the needle does the opposite. This looks really weird, but as long as it slams over this way, you know that it's working. This setting gives the sound a certain sense of urgency. It strains it. It's great for a vocal that needs extra urgency. Of course, you are going to be able to control the amount of strain in the voice by the input level. In the beginning, the needle may not move at all, so you have to keep bringing the gain up until the needle starts slamming over to the left.

Here's the additional touch for this: The compressor is so wild in what it's doing with the vocal [for example], that although you don't hear the vocal coming in and out, you are hearing this intense sound. That's the best way I can describe it. Then you start bringing that second channel up to where it would normally phase out totally. Because the compression is moving this sound around, it kind of goes in and out of phase. So you back it off, just before you get to it. You have to play with this, but what that can do--especially with a vocal or instruments--is make the sound explosive.

There's a sweet spot, and you have to play around to find it. If you feel that it's starting to phase out, or it's disappearing, you might want to play with that second channel. Remember, if you bring the whole thing up out of phase, no matter what it is, it's going to disappear. But when you have that kind of compression going on, and you put it right before its cutoff--it's 180 degrees out--weird things start happening. It's pretty wild!

Editor Rick Clark is a writer, songwriter and producer based in Nashville.