[GUITAR PLAYING]
Hey, I'm Stan from Fender, and we're here today
with Josh Smith.
And we're looking at the Compugilist.
The Compugilist is part compressor and half
of a pugilist distortion all rolled up into one pedal.
So let's look around the panel and see what we find.
On the compressor side, there's a control
for the amount of compression.
There's a control for the recovery time.
That affects how quickly the compressor
comes back up to volume.
A compressor's job, when you play
and you dig in all of a sudden, it'll
grab the part that gets louder and bring the volume down.
The recovery time says how long does
it take to get back up to full volume again.
So short settings can be really responsive,
but sometimes they can sound a little choppy.
When you make it too long, sometimes that next note you
hit ends up being too quiet.
So somewhere in the middle, there's
a setting that will feel natural, sound great.
Lastly, there's a level control that affects the overall output
level of the compressor.
This compressor is capable of adding a lot of clean boost
without having a lot of compression, too.
So if you just want to use it like a clean boost in front
of the drive, you can do that.
And then there's a LED called GR, which
stands for Gain Reduction.
And that thing lights up when the compressor actually
grabs hold of the signal.
So one of the ways that I set the threshold control is I'll
increase it until on loud guitar picks,
I can just see the LED start to come on.
And that kind of tells your ear, even though the compressor is
really subtle, it gives you a good clue
that something's kind of starting to happen.
There's a bypass foot switch for it.
It's true bypass, of course.
It's all analog.
On the distortion side, there's a gain control,
there's a tone control, there's an output level control,
and there's a toggle switch for bass boost.
The bass boost is useful.
If you're playing through a fully totally clean app,
kicking the bass boost on will kind of
fill out the low end a little bit
and make it sound more natural.
If you're playing through another paddle,
like stacking with something or you're
playing through an amp that's already a little distorted,
sometimes having that bass boost on can be a little too muddy.
So flip it off for a little more articulation.
There's a true bypass foot switch down here as well.
Let's get into some of the sounds, but first, Josh,
what are you playing?
I'm playing a Vintera '60s Tele Modified,
and we're plugged into a '68 Custom Deluxe Reverb.
STAN COTEY: Awesome.
And here's the guitar with the pedal bypassed.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
All right, let's start with the compressor.
I'm going to set the threshold really low,
so it's going to hardly do anything.
When Josh digs in, it'll grab some of the peaks.
It's not going to sound like it's doing much.
It's very transparent.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
Yep.
I'll add a little more compression.
It'll get a little squishier.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
Next, let's jump over to the distortion side.
I'm going to start with the gain pretty low,
so it'll be fairly clean.
And then as Josh plays, I'll turn the gain up a little more.
All right.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
Cool.
The bass boost, let's go through that.
Here's off.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
On.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
You can hear the extra fullness there.
Absolutely.
OK.
And the tone control, the tone control
goes from very bright to extremely muted.
So if your amp has a bright switch,
it's a great way to kind of tame that,
but still retain crystal clear, clean tones.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
Let's play with some of the combined sounds.
JOSH SMITH: All right.
STAN COTEY: Kick a little compression on.
I'm going to drop the gain a little bit.
Get a little rootsy.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
Try that same thing with the bass boost off.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
And while this is meant to be a low to mid gain
distortion side, by combining the two halves,
you can actually get a lot of gain out of it
for single note playing.
So I'm going to turn the level down.
I'm going to crank the gain up and turn up
a bunch of compression.
And then it should be really good and fat
for single note stuff.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
You hear all the sustain at the end of it.
All right, that was a look at the Compugilist, compressor,
and distortion pedal.
Josh, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Stan, man.
Great pedal.
Thank you.
Great.
For more information on the Compugilist,
as well as the full line of Fender pedals,
go to Fender.com, and stick around for more videos.
Would you play us out?
Absolutely.
[GUITAR PLAYING]