First of all I like your pedalboard. Your chain is similar to mine. 
I always use my compressor (subtle) at the start of my chain. You donāt want to kill dynamics. I donāt get a fat tone from my comp (you have two types), but it does even the volume between my strings and it gives more sustain which results in a very pleasing tone. I think you will still tame your OC if you change the order.
This is my beast, a fuzz pedal! Here is a short clip on how it sound on ānormalā settings. When I hit Roar or Choke it gets a bit out of hand 
That Beast is out of control! 
Compression after distortion does serve a role though and itās not surprising you like what you can do with it there.
I always have at least one and usually two compressors at the end of the chain for every track - one for overall tone, and then a track limiter.
You can also just do this like I do in the DAW; throw a compressor plugin on your bass track and there you go.
@howard Iāve been reading a lot about compressors, now that I have one, and a lot of people seem to think there is something magical about running into an 1176 and then an LA-2A. Have you toyed with this?
People like them because they are classic compressors with distinctive effects and a bit of warmth. You wonāt go wrong with them, at minimum. Also, known quantities, kind of like Fender basses.
Thatās exactly where mine is going too. Since I somehow was tipped off to an offer I couldnāt refuse, I have an extra compressor.
I look forward to hearing what you think about it. What is the other compressor?
@eric.kiser - Iāve been doing this setup on all of my covered since I got both plugins for my DAW. I think this is so popular is that it was a very common / traditional setup in studios for years and years. To my simple ears they work well together and give me what I want in a very easy, almost foolproof way, which may be why the combo is also popular. @JerryP now uses the same thing in DAW. Once you start using itās tough to not. @howard uses a lot more compressors but heās also scoring entire songs Vs a bass track and a backing track, too advanced for me. Lol
For live playing I havenāt yet seen a need for more than the 1176.
Putting a LA-2 at the end of the chain and using it kind of like a limiter would be neat. Nice optical compression plus natural tube compression, thereās a reason people love them.
https://www.fealabs.com/products/opti-fet/
It has EQ knobs for the side chain signal that triggers the compressor, not EQ for what you are hearing.
An impressive and impressively complex pedal. It strikes me as very DaveT.
Is it as dead quiet as their marketing makes out?
Does the warm setting offer anything over what you already get from your tube preamp?
The TLC is a very different animal. This is my first compressor but what I seem to be hearing is more of a tranparent tightening everything up versus a compressor that does color, warmth, and fattening.
Im looking forward to hearing your take on the TLC.
The way my brain works is that I like to have lots of simple knobs where I know what they do. It frustrates me to have several functions tied together on a single knob where I canāt figure out what combination of things are changing or things that I want to change fixed. I guess itās fine if you are lucky enough to find a pedal that ājust works.ā
On the FEA Opti-Fet, itās seems easier for me to say I only want the pedal to pay attention to bringing up the midrange and turn down the treble that would otherwise trigger the compressor. You can also do the same thing by setting the attack time longer. Although thatās the traditional method, it seems less intuitive to me. Time and frequency are joined at the hip. Different windows into the same end result.
If they leave the Threshold knob off, that means you have to either turn up the Input knob or hit the pedal with a hotter signal to begin with to get it to start compressing where you want. I think this is one of the problems people have with the MXR85, hitting it hard enough to be in its working range. It makes more sense to me to just turn a threshold down so it kicks in sooner.
Yes. Dead. Completely. Dead. I can turn the Gain up to max and it has no audible self generated noise through a 4x10 with tweeter. I can turn it up loud enough to hear the strings vibrating with the bass sitting still on a stand. Iām pretty sure thatās too much sustain.
I think one of the possible problems people also have with compressor noise is not always from the compressor itself, but from not driving it with the hottest signal they can. A compressor is always going to bring up both the note and the noise floor together when you turn it up after the compression happens. If the pickups are rolled off more than they need to be on the bass, the compressor gets fed with unnecessary noise. An active bass is usually going to feed the compressor with less noise than a passive one. If thereās a noisy pedal in the chain before the compressor, that noise will get brought up too.
Iāve never opened the cover to flip the DIP switch to turn that on. I donāt want a combo function with compression unless itās the other way around where I bought a particular effect that includes compression as part of its effect.
I can go on and on about how musical the sound of the Blackbird tube pedal is. The timbre of the overdrive is like it has acoustic instrument harmonics, like each one are perfect chord tones. Itās like the difference between someone coloring their hair and coloring each strand of their hair separately to make an ombre.
It sounds like Iām going to like it!
Same here! This is why I dislike controls like the dry-chorus-vibrato knob on the Julia, or the Era knob on the smaller Darkglass VMT. Just give me the actual single-parameter controls, thanks. More is better in that case.
in one of the latest sweetwater vids, josh scott was on talking about this trick. Iāve heard him mention this before. itās one of those mo betta tricks, where you donāt realize itās making your tone mo betta until you turn it off. so itās an always on thing. take any vibrato, turn the speed down really low and set the depth/tone to nominal. just kind of fattens things up, i like it.
I just tried that on my HX Stomp. Yeah that works 
In the Stomp I like using the Retro Reel to fatten up the sound. Itās an old tape reel to reel effect.
Phase delay with a very short phase works well too (which is basically what the vibrato is doing).
I like MDoubleTracker for this.
My Zoom pedals have a ādetuneā effect which is not changing the tuning by much like the name might imply (it isnāt a āpitch shifterā). Itās like detuning multiple synth oscillators from each other, ie itās doubling your part and then detuning them by just a few cents so you get a subtle chorusing/thickening effect.
That works really well too.
Another thing you can do is just duplicate a track in the DAW and pitch-shift it a tiny bit. Or zoom waaaaaaaaay in and offset its timing by a tiny amount. All of these things work in a slightly different way but fatten things up nicely.
