Compadre is the result of more than one year of research, development, and countless hours of listening tests. The final product is a quality compressor that not only delivers a highly tuned sonic behaviour, but also drips with character.
Compadre is designed specifically for use on beats, drum loops, and other percussive material, and it does this with attitude and flexibility. Use it for subtle enhancements or heavy duty compression. While Compadre has been designed with drums in mind, its range of flexibility allows it to also deliver good and often unique performances on many other types of tracks; such as for example bass tracks.
Compadre is a compressor with an attitude and a truly unique sound. We like to describe Compadre's sound as aggressive, with a tight & punchy attack and an airy release capable of very musical pumping. It's a sound that suits drums - and also bass - very well, which makes it easy to achieve great results with a minimum of tweaking.
Compadre offers features you will not find on other compressors whether software or hardware. The "Shaper" mode offers a more experimental mode of compression allowing inspiring effects ranging from transient shaping to wild and funky gated-sounding compression. Other unique features are host tempo-sync perfect for rhythmic compression, wet/dry mix for parallel compression and low-level controls to tweak the compressor response.
Compadre gives you full control over the sidechain with both external input and sidechain filtering. Using an external input to trigger the compression is what's often referred to as sidechain compression and is used extensively in modern electronic productions. Sidechain filtering allows you filter just the sidechain - and not the outgoing audio path - which can be used to make the compression more or less sensitive to certain frequencies.
In rough terms, a compressor can be described to consist of two circuits; the level detection circuit and the gain reduction circuit. Sidechaining is all about giving you control over the signal that enters the detector circuit and ultimately drives the gain reduction. The most common techniques involve filtering the sidechain, or assigning a different audio source to control the compression. Compadre allows the combination of both.
Compadre offers plenty of sidechain filtering capabilities with its low- and highpass filters and 9 preset filter models. Sidechain filtering does not alter the spectrum of the output, instead it changes which frequencies triggers the compression and allows you a great deal of control of how the compression will sound. For example, if your track needs a smoother sounding compression, selecting the "Smooth" filter will filter out the very high & low frequencies of the sidechain signal that could otherwise stress the compression.
Compadre has an extra set of inputs allowing you to route any signal to the sidechain. This can be used for a vast amount of creative and experimental applications, but it also has use for a range of traditional and well proven production techniques; such as "ducking" & "de-essing". Ducking is a useful technique when dealing with overlapping frequencies in a busy mix, but often it is also used creatively in dance music by letting the kick drum trigger compression of bass and synths for pronounced rhythmic impact. Compadre works great for those tasks.
