The Airchild Six Sixty Compressor is our sonic interpretation of the famous vintage Fairchild 660 studio compressor, which is consistently regarded as the best compressor ever made. For years we’ve used the original Fairchild 660 and 670 (Stereo) compressors in the studio, and now we’ve decided to try and make that sonic signature available to the guitar community without the $10-$100k price tag.
The typical iconic circuit tends to crush the sound more like a limiter but has also cemented that sound into certain genres of music, which is highly desired. We wanted to make available a compressor that works like a studio compressor, that enhances harmonic richness and evens out transients, without crushing the entire spectrum.
- Output – For full squish, keep your output at unity or less. It’s interactive with the threshold control, so as you dialup the threshold your volume will increase, and you can back off the output to hear the compression effect. If you push the output, and hit the front of your amp hard, it creates gain. Therefore the compression gets lost. The pedal will create sustain and harmonic richness.
- Tone - A typical one knob compressor will introduce noise, and mess with the top end in an ugly way. The EQ on the AIRCHILD helps mitigate those typical issues and allows you to balance out the overall EQ to be natural. Just turn the knob counterclockwise and it will introduce more bottom and less top end. Turn it clockwise and it will introduce more top and less bottom end.
- Blend - Blend simply allows you to blend your dry signal with the compressed signal allowing for fine tuning.
- Threshold - All the way counterclockwise is fully off, and all the way clockwise is fully compressed. You can then tailor that to your preference by using the blend control to balance it out. You can experiment with the threshold control and hear how interactive it is with the output control. The more output, the more gain, so the effect will be less noticeable with a hotter output.
