Pickups provide input gain. Lowering the input gain has a whole host of interactions with a compressor. For example, if your level had been high enough to cause clipping at the input stage, it will lessen that. But, lowering the input gain also affects where your signal lands relative to the threshold of the compressor. I just looked up the janglebox and dynacomp. They're both two-knob boxes. A compressor involves a threshold (dB), a compression ratio (x:1), attack (ms), release (ms), output gain (dB), and knee (hard vs soft).akpasta wrote: ↑Tue Jan 16, 2018 10:47 amIf compression, and not pickups are causing this. How would you explain my getting a clean tone by lowering the pickups all the way? My understanding is that hot pickups can push an amp to distort quicker, so lowering them is like lowering "gain" on an amp or something. Curtis Novak says the stock pickups do this and his lower wound ones don't, so that's why I am trying those instead. I hope they work!
Each of those two pedals has two knobs - (output) gain and attack on the JB, and (output) gain and sensitivity (threshold? Ratio? Unclear).
Dropping the input level by lowering the pickups is very crudely altering where your signal lands relative to the compressor's seemingly-unalterable threshold, and the fact that this sounds better to you is suggesting to me that your compressors are, well, compressing too much, or at too low a threshold.
Compression generally sounds best when it is transparent and almost undetectable. Squashing the hell out of a signal with preset release and ratio on a 2-knob pedal has never sounded good to me; I only owned one compressor pedal (a Humphrey Audio-modded CS-3), and only used it sparingly, at low settings.
12-strings put out a lot of signal. They have twice as many strings! The XII also has two small coils connected in series. I am not surprised that this drives pedals hard. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means you need the right pedal, or perhaps no pedal at all. Rics might sound nice with compression because their tone is notoriously transient-heavy (strong attack) with weaker decay (sustain). A Fender XII has a rounder, softer transient and relatively stronger decay. It's just a wildly different input signal, that cannot be expected to respond like a Ric - especially to compression.