Afterlife Debugging

[angrykoko]

Hey,

Got my afterlife built... not sure it's working, never tried a compressor before.

Volume pot increases/decreases volume when pedal turned on.
Sustain pot seems to make some minor volume differences (mostly nothing until it's close to dimed then it get's slightly louder).

I don't get any extra sustain like this guy (jump to 1:43)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeGq5umdgaM

I don't really notice any management in sound volume playing hard/soft or in between

My fist guess is the Valctrol isnt working.. but before I do something stupid and ruin it (expensive devil)  how can I test it?  9v battery directly to the led side? and watch for change across the photocell side?  Can I test it in place?

Thanks in advance.

[midwayfair]

I'll have a demo of the Afterlife uploaded soon so you can compare. Here's some stuff in the meantime:

1) The afterlife (and most guitar pedal compressors) are LIMITERS. They reduce the upper limit of your volume so things even out. Sometimes they will also produce some "swell" on the tail of the note, which gives the appearance of added sustain. The Afterlife/Flatline doesn't do this as far as I can tell.

2) The sustain pot does cut volume. This is the limiting in the circuit. You will have to put your volume up to compensate. At one extreme of the sustain pot, you'll hear things really open up, so it'll be acting like a clean boost. The rest of the sweep will gradually get warmer and squishier.

3) This is not a hard or drastic compressor. It's subtle. It's much more subtle than a Dynacomp, and it's less of an effect than an Orange Squeezer.

It sounds to me like yours is working, but you were expecting something more drastic.

Try it in front of a good low-gain OD with the compression cranked. You should be able to switch between chords (which will be cleaner than with it off) and single notes (which will be more distorted and louder). This to me is the best use of a compressor in the guitar signal chain.

[angrykoko]

Thanks Midwayfair!

You described the characteristics of how mine acts/sounds dead on. 
I agree then that it's working.

I was kind of expecting that swell effect at the end.... mostly because that was the only thing out of all the video demos of several comps... where I could make out that a comp possibly did.   Funny thing was that even though I could not work out if it was working properly or not (because of the missing swell)... I kept the effect on for a long time and played with it just between me and the amp because I liked this subtle change it made... cant describe it though... just liked it 

I'll grab my OD this afternoon and give your suggestion a try.

Look forward to your demo.

Thanks!

[Craig Beauchamp]

I just finished the afterlife build and wanted a little more comp, so I put a couple 1N34 in reverse parallel from vol lug 1 to vol lug 3. It did a little, but not enough so I increased R4 to 47k. The R4 change really made a difference. It gets pretty skanky if the sustain is maxed and you're picking hard with high output pickups, but you can still turn down the sustain if it's too much. It definitely got more comp out of it though. I dig it now. I don't know if it will cause the Vactrol to die faster though. I guess I'll find out.
Hope this helps some folks.
C

[midwayfair]

Just to follow up, this is a great resource for anyone wondering about how any particular comp does its thing:

http://www.ovnilab.com/

I wish I'd found this months ago before I ever built a comp, or for that matter years ago before I started using them.