Jim Dunlop MXR Dyna Comp Pedal

Product Information

A lot of guitarists love the Phase 90 and many hate it. I personally feel that the one control knob isn’t enough and you’re better off finding a pedal that allows you to adjust the effect with a bit more control. First and foremost, we are guitarists, and we want other players to find the right product for them. So we take into careful consideration everything from budget to feature set, ease of use and durability to come up with a list of what we can safely say are the best bass compressors on the market right now. Unlike the Phase 90, the Electric Mistress gives you more control over the effect. This is a flanger so you will hear a distinctly different effect with a more metallic resonance. It is twice the price of the Phase 90 or the BOSS below so keep this in mind when comparing the options.

Before we really dig into the details, it would be important to note where in the signal chain the Dyna Comp is most effective. In this review, I ran the Dyna Comp straight into the amp with no pedals in front of it. However, if you are adding this pedal to your signal chain, I found it best to put it at the very front, after your tuner pedal, but before the rest of your pedals. My chain consists of distortion, phaser, chorus, reverb, and wah pedals. Generally speaking, I found that having the Dyna Comp before all of these pedals left the effects unaffected, and only impacted my tone, which is what I wanted. So, win-win! How to use your Dyna Comp The MXR Dyna Comp is revered in the guitar world as being one of the “first” guitar pedal compressors.The aim of the OTA is to apply a variable gain to the original guitar signal, giving more amplification to weak signals and less to the hi-level waveforms. This amount of gain is set by the current bias pin 5 of the CA3080 and generated in the next stage (Envelope Detector) The input capacitor C1 (10nF) gives DC isolation and together with R2 (1MΩ) - R1 is ignored because 10K is much smaller than 1M - and the input impedance of the Emitter Follower (equal to 1MΩ and calculated in the next point) creates a high pass filter:

This rig gives you possibly the best amp and guitar combination for home use and provides a full range of effect pedals to cover David’s entire career. You have access to a vibe, phaser, flanger and chorus pedal which means you can tweak each pedal and achieve the closest match to any effect you hear on early or late albums. While most compressors are designed to impart some sort of sonic signature to your sound (albeit subtle), the Ego is designed to be much like a standard modern studio compressor in a compact pedalboard format, without any sort of significant tone coloration to your signal while still sounding musical. The Script Dyna Comp like the regular Dyna Comp that came before has a simple set of two controls. The output which sets the overall volume level of the pedal meaning you can actually boost the volume of your guitar using this pedal and the sensitivity control. This acts as your compressor threshold and ratio in one, but in general the more you turn it up the more compressed your signal becomes. Here's what MXR say about the Script Dyna Comp Compression Pedal In the world of compressors, there are two schools of thought. One ideal holds that compressors should subtle, ninja-like, there but not there. Fans of the Barber Tone Press and (to some degree) the Keeley Compressor fall into this camp. The other ideal holds that compressors are only worth their salt if they add some real texture of their own, building in a flavor that somehow does more than just rein in the peaks and valleys of the EQ. The king of this latter school of thought is the MXR Dyna Comp. The reason is that the RAT has a filter knob which allows you to change the fuzz distortion in ways that aren’t possible with the Big Muff or the Fuzz Face. So from a versatility point of view, the RAT is a better option.

Try having the MXR first in the chain of compressors at a relatively high Output level and with medium Sensitivity. This will give the signal a nice boost. You’d be better off getting something like the Ego Wampler Compressor or the MXR Studio Compressor Pedal. The Dyna-Comp is for people who want that drive that you don’t get on similar pedals. It’s what makes it special. Gear Mentioned The parts in the design are not critical, you can use substitutes for the transistors (2N3904) or the silicon diodes (1N914). The only part which is not so easy to find nowadays is the CA3080 IC. The plot of the Input Stage freq response shows a unity gain and a filtering of the excess of bass (dc-level), preserving a good flat response between 20Hz and 20KHz.