Polyend Press

It may come in the form of a stompbox, but there’s studio‑quality processing inside — and more than enough control for serious mixing.

There was a time when the best you could hope for from a compressor pedal was a few knobs and a half‑decent chance of increasing an instrument’s sustain. I never really got on with that sort of thing — it just felt clumsy and unsatisfying to me, and I much preferred studio‑style compressors, whose settings I could dial in more precisely. Thankfully, recent years have seen quite a few more capable dynamics processors packed into pedal‑sized boxes. As well as the various excellent analogue‑modelling digital devices, we’ve seen a range of good analogue options, including FET compressors (for example from Origin Effects), optical compressors (such as the JoeMeek Floor‑Q) and some excellent VCA compressors (from Becos FX, amongst others). And some of them do much more than control the attack, sustain and dynamic range of a signal, for example offering side‑chain control, dual bands, EQ and filtering, or saturation/distortion.

Press Pack

The latest company to tread this path are Polyend, who I’d hitherto thought of mostly as a company whose focus was firmly on the synth market. But while their new Press VCA compressor pedal caters for that crowd, of course, it also boasts a number of interesting features that should mean it has just as much appeal for guitarists and bassists, and, in fact, pretty much anyone who’s looking for a pedal or tabletop compressor to use on stage or in the studio.

With a footprint of about 105mm (a shade over four inches) by 120mm (4.75 inches), it takes up a chunk of pedalboard real estate if that’s where you want to put it, but it’s not unreasonably large. It’s powered by a 9V, centre‑negative PSU of the sort usually used for guitar effects and pedalboards. There isn’t one included and there’s no internal battery option; you’ll need a PSU capable of supplying 350mA. The power inlet is on the back panel, of course, and there you’ll also find the main I/O on two quarter‑inch TRS jacks.

As well as the main mono/stereo I/O, there are also mini‑jacks for an external side‑chain input, and to pass the input/side‑chain signal on to another device.

The input/output jacks cater for mono instrument or unbalanced stereo line‑level I/O, selected using a slide switch. You could, for example feed the left and right TS jack outs from a synth or drum machine into it, using a Y‑lead, or connect a guitar directly to it...