H-Comp Hybrid Compressor

I came back to this compressor recently and decided to give it a proper work-out. There's some good features here that you won't find anywhere else.

First thing you'll notice is the GUI is the size of your head. Why anyone would want a threshold dial bigger than their own eyeball is unclear. But if you're partly blind, this could be the compressor for you.

The GR meter is also huge. I like a big fast GR meter and this is gratuitous beyond belief. Easy to read, fast and accurate as far as I can tell. There's an automatic make-up on this compressor that can't be disabled which means you might find yourself using the meter more than usual. Furthermore the dry/wet comes before the GR meter. This means that you can see the GR post parallel. I found it fast and novel doing parallel with the auto-make-up and the GR routing. Also note that the meter further includes the amount removed by the limiter etc.

The implementation of the release is also quite unique. It optionally syncs to the tempo of your daw, thereby facilitating release times of 1/4 bar 1/16 bar etc. The release can also be set very fast (3ms). The attack is fairly standard and runs between 0.5ms and 100ms.

Yet another curious feature is the "punch" dial. This seems to mix some of the dry signal in immediately following the transients (measured in ms?) Could be useful for slamming techno etc. The effect is considerably different to merely increasing the attack.

There's additionally four optional "analog" modes of operation. They do sound quite different and it's a nice way to change the sound without altering the compression. Flicking through the dial I mostly noticed variations in frequency response and I was glad that none of the options seemed to include white noise (a pet hate of mine). It's a complete mystery what sort of processing is occurring and waves tells us absolutely nothing on their pdf etc. It may be that some engineers modelled the analog modes on various hardware units. Or perhaps they just randomly made up some algorithms.

The compressor includes a 0db limiter/clipper at the output that annoyingly cannot be disabled. You can switch between the limiter and the clipper but I found it hard to determine the difference even on heavy settings, so presumably it's not a very good limiter.

This may not produce the sound of more famous software or hardware compressors but I got some good sounds out of this. It's all subjective right? And the original arrangement and workflow may help to you to do something you wouldn't have otherwise thought of. It may be a good compressor for four to the floor type edm. Also good if you want to do something a bit crunchy and kooky.