 TubeTek CL-1B style compressors have been at the heart of many great recordings over the years and the great news is they've just become affordable. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The TubeTek CL-1B has been an incredibly popular opto compressor especially for vocals but also for other instruments as well and if you were to go and buy one today it would cost you around about four thousand US dollars but thankfully Warm Audio just released the WA-1B which is a product very similar to the original CL-1B at around about a quarter of the price and by the way if you happen to be one of my Australian viewers follow the link in the description down below and use the discount code because I've found a special deal for you at the moment. So what is it that makes this opto compressor so special? We're going to be finding out in this video by using it with acoustic guitar, bass guitar and also vocals as well and we'll be talking about how it differs from some other popular compressors. Before we dive into all of that I'd like to thank our sponsor DistroKid. If you follow their discount link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. So let's start off by applying this compressor to some acoustic guitar. So for the acoustic guitar I'm using something called fixed mode for the attack and release. You can see this control in the middle here is set to fixed. Now while we're in this mode these two controls the attack and release control actually don't do anything. Instead the attack and release are set to 1 millisecond and 50 milliseconds respectively. Now that means that we're in kind of simple mode if you like because the only two controls that really affect compression now are the threshold control here where we set the level in terms of decibels, where compression kicks in and the ratio control which controls the amount of compression. Now with this compressor we have ratios from 2 to 1 all the way through to 10 to 1 and for this acoustic guitar I have it set to around about 7 to 1 which is sort of reasonably high I guess but I think you've got to go for what sounds best for the material you're working with. Now in a moment when I play this acoustic guitar you're going to see the VU meter move over here. Now just as a little bit of a side note on this particular compressor from Warm Audio we have a calibration knob for the VU meter down here so I can adjust that as you can see like so which is really handy because a lot of these have sort of internal screws and things like that. And what we're going to be seeing is the amount of gain reduction we get from the compression and that's because this is set to compression here for the VU meter. Now you could also use the VU meter to monitor input or output which would be kind of handy if you're doing some volume matching if you want to make sure that your output is roughly the same as your input. Now if you did want to adjust the actual output you would use this control over here the gain control this is actually an output or makeup gain control. I've seen some people who describe this as an input gain that is incorrect so do keep that in mind if you're using this compressor. And finally before we actually start to listen to the acoustic guitar I want to point out that I'll be using this bypass switch over here. This is a true bypass meaning that when we're in this mode there is no signal going through the electronics of this unit whatsoever it's just directly going from the input to the output jacks on the back. Now I have gone for some fairly mild compression with this you're going to see one two and maybe up to three decibels of gain reduction happening as we play this piece. Let's start off with it without the compression to begin with and you'll see me flick this switch to switch the compression on. So the goal here for me is just to actually control the guitar I'm not doing anything that would make you feel like you can really hear some compression it still sounds natural but we are controlling some of those transits some of those peaks. So my goal with the bass guitar was to even out a fairly uneven performance meaning that some of the notes I played were much louder than others nothing unusual about that so I wanted to even that out and I also wanted to emphasize the sustain of the bass guitar as well. So I went for manual control over the attack and release in this case and on this unit the attack ranges from 0.5 to 300 milliseconds and the release goes from 0.5 to 10 seconds okay so quite a long release time available there. I set the ratio to around about five to one in this case I've got a pretty fast attack meaning I want to sort of allow some of the transient through but then clamped down on it and also had a pretty fast release because I didn't want to be compressing the sustain of the bass guitar in this case. Now I'm going to play this in context with the acoustic guitar that we already heard because I think it's important when you're you know compressing things like bass guitars to be listening to them in context of other instruments so let's have a listen to the result. Don't forget when you do release your music to use our sponsor DistroKid it's really easy you just have to upload your track some artwork fill in a simple form and they do the rest for you they get it out to all of the major platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Google Play all of the places you should care about just follow the VIP link in the description down below and get 7% off. So now we're on to the main event in my opinion because I love this compressor on vocals. Again I've gone for the manual setting for attack and release and I've set a fairly fast attack not the fastest I want to let some of those transients through but reasonably fast and then an almost as fast as possible release time as well so I'm focusing on transients at the beginning of words and things controlling those in turn allows me to sort of elevate the quieter parts of the vocal as well. I'm using a ratio of around about four to one on this occasion so not quite as aggressive as I was using earlier on and I'm going to start off by playing these vocals in solo however I'm then going to switch over and listen to them in the context of the rest of the song including the bass and the guitar that we compressed earlier on using this compressor let's have a listen in solo first and now in the context of the other instruments in the song it sounds like this so I just want to talk about a couple of features that we didn't use in the examples here first of all with our attack and release times we used fixed earlier and then later on we used manual but you can also select a combination of the two now this particularly affects the release time which is much more nuanced and non-linear and you can have one initial release curve followed by a different release curve towards the end so it's worth experimenting with that. The other thing I'd like to point out is the sidechain feature there's actually two sidechain connections on the back of the unit and we can select between them here now in the original manual and the warm audio manual they both state that the intention of this is to combine several compressors together so that would be something worth experimenting with. I'm a massive fan of both the LA2A and 1176 style compressors and in fact I've got a WA2A and a WA76 from Warm Audio and I love them both but they're very very different beats on one hand you have the 2A another opto compressor like the 1B that we've been looking at today but with a very different characteristic to it it's got a very slow attack and release time you don't have direct control over those elements of it but it does what it does really well it works really nicely on vocals and bass guitar for me and it just is easy to dial in a setting and it just seems to work wonders on the other hand if you want something with much more control and is much more aggressive then the 1176 is the way to go this is a FET compressor it's got really fast attack and release times you've got really high ratios that you can use and it's just fantastic especially for me in controlling those sort of big transients that you can get sometimes I love it and I often use in combination with the 2A so where does this new compressor sit with those two well I would say squarely in the middle it's nowhere near as gentle as the 2A you've got a lot more control with it but it's not as aggressive as the 76 and I would suggest that if you can't afford both the 2A and the 76 go for this one it really is kind of the best of both worlds and you're going to get great results on all kinds of instruments don't forget if you're an Australian viewer to check that link in the description down below with the discount code to get a great deal from sounds easy today and if you're from some other part of the world there are links for you in the description as well now if you'd like to know more about the difference between 2A and 76 style compressors you may want to take a look in fact you should take a look at this video right here