[MUSIC]
Hi, I'm Stan Cotey, I'm a product designer at Fender.
>> And I'm Rick Heins, the amp guy at Fender, and
we're here today to talk about The Bends Compressor Pedal.
Now, first and foremost, as a guitarist,
I always feel like this is one of those elusive pedals that guitarists have
a really hard time explaining what it does and how it works.
You feel it sometimes, but when we designed this pedal from scratch,
we took a unique approach.
>> Compressors, there's lots of different families of compressors, and
there are very precise studio kinds of compressors.
There's a long lineage of guitar stomp compressors and
they have very different feels and textures.
For me, as a guitar player, I like the stomp guitar style compressor more than I
like the classical, straight up studio compressor.
So this is in that family of things, but
there are some unique things about it that make it kind of cool.
So, it uses a part called a operational trans conductance amp.
Which is a really fancy way of saying it can vary the volume of your signal from
a control signal.
So it watches how loud your signal is, and when you get too loud,
it starts to turn you down automatically.
So that's really handy, like a great playing place for
that is if you are a singer and you're singing and playing rhythm guitar.
Maybe your rhythm guitar,
you don't want to worry about being exactly perfectly even.
So the compressor can, when you play a little too loud,
it can kind of bring you down a little bit.
When you play a little too quietly, it can kind of bring you up, so
it makes the performance a little more even.
I can actually show you that on this compressor.
So this is set up with a a fair amount of compression, if we bypass it,
you can hear, I'll play a quiet note and I'll play a loud note.
So just quiet.
[MUSIC]
And loud.
Quiet.
Loud.
[MUSIC]
So now with the compressor on, I'll play quiet, about the same hardness.
[MUSIC]
And then hard again.
[MUSIC]
And I'll do that same thing.
[MUSIC]
So if I'm a little sloppy with my pick technique,
it helps to compensate for that.
Now one of the things about that is,
you noticed that second sound when I hit the chord really hard.
This is probably over-compressed for what you'd really use.
But compressors, when you drive them too hard,
they can kind of take a little bit of the life out of stuff.
So we put a feature in that's a blend control,
that lets you blend in some of the natural dynamics of your playing.
So I'll play hard picking consistently, and Rick can turn the blend control and
bring some of that in.
You can kind of hear some of the life come back to it.
[MUSIC]
So that's totally just the straight guitar sound.
[MUSIC]
And then he'll start blending in the compression.
[MUSIC]
Then that's the more flattened.
[MUSIC]
Thing, and if you come back to about, I don't know,
third of the way back or something.
[MUSIC]
You get where you can still hear.
[MUSIC]
It still has some life to it.
>> Well, it's got that thing to it, where a lot of country players,
when they do chicken picking.
Or all that kind of stuff, you kind of hear that sound.
I feel like when you dig into it, even though you feel the compression,
it's a really warm kind of squishy sound.
It feels really comfortable and it just sounds really good,
there's nothing harsh about it.
>> Yeah, compression, for me, it's almost, it's like taking a clean sound.
But it gives it some of the same characteristics of playing with a lot of
overdrive, just clean.
But it gives you all that extra sustain in a note.
[MUSIC]
It just lets you hang in space.
[MUSIC]
Except for the fact that it's completely beautiful and glassy.
[MUSIC]
It gives you a range of expression where you can hear more of what you're
doing with your pick.
>> Yeah, so everything from subtle to extreme, it just,
it sounds good and it seems to fit any sort of application.
>> Yeah, this compressor sometimes can be noisy.
So this actually has two of the operational transconductance amps that
work at the same time.
And by mixing them together, you can kind of tuck the noise down a little bit so
it has a cool feature there.
And the other thing about it is,
the way it does the analog math inside is very precise and very fast.
So when I'm playing,
some compressors can have a big giant pop at the beginning of the note.
When it's like, I've got to turn something down, and it jumps in and
it takes a little bit of time, this one doesn't so much do that.
So I can play, quietly and loudly.
And it just comes in and grabs the note and turns the volume down, but
it doesn't smack you in the face first.
[MUSIC]
So it tends to be pretty transparent as a result.
>> I've heard other ones that sometimes that when you do that,
it clamps down on the note, it's a little harsh.
And it feels jarring to my ear, and this one doesn't do that.
The other thing I notice is when you're hitting the compression, or
you're hitting this hard, the jewel actually changes color to show that.
>> Yeah, compression can be really subtle, and so
we wanted to give people a way to know when it was happening.
Because too much compression, again, can kind of take the life out of stuff.
So having an indicator that just tells you when it's actually doing something,
so like I'll play again quietly, you'll see.
[MUSIC]
It doesn't do much, if you can watch the indicator.
[MUSIC]
So when it's on solid like that, it's compressing all the time.
And when it's flickering,
it's only compressing on the very loudest peaks of the note.
[MUSIC]
>> Well, one of the great things also about the Bends pedal, and
all the new Fender pedals, is we really thought about players.
When they play live and dealing with situations that happen to all of us.
So one of the things that we did is it's got a door at the bottom that's an easy
flip open so you can put your nine volt in there really quickly.
If you've got to change it on the fly, if you're on stage, the other thing, too,
is you probably noticed that it's got glowing knobs.
Which is a really nice feature if you're actually on stage and
you need to see where everything's set.
But you have the ability to switch it in the back and turn those lights off, so
you can actually preserve the battery if you need to.
One other thing that's cool for people that have big pedal boards is you have
the inputs and outputs slightly at a different angle.
So that you can actually get the pedals closer, if you're building a pedal board,
so they fit nicely.
Sometimes if they're parallel, you've got to put the pedals further out.
>> What you're hearing today, by the way, just for me,
it's a straight up Telecaster, right into the Bends compressor.
And then directly into a Blues Junior.
Rick's playing a straight up Strat, also through a Bends compressor,
into a Princeton Reverb.
Thanks for checking out The Bends compressor with us today, and
stay tuned for more videos.
[MUSIC]