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But if you want more even then you could try EMGs. What tuning do you play in?
Im not sure that would deliver the second part of what I was talking about though as after going trhough fairly heavy distortion it'll be compressed anyway regardless of input signal.
To be clear Im not even sure it's something I want, its more wondering if anyone has ever tried it, and what it sounds like.
You could try a volume pedal between whatever's giving you distortion and compression and your amp.
So like take a normal guitar into a reasonably distorted sound, if you pick softly you get a quieter sound but it is also a little bit cleaner. If you pick harder you get a louder sound that is also more distorted.
If you have loads of distortion the difference between these 2 becomes more marginal.
What Im saying is that imagine if you first compressed the signal so that no matter how hard you hit you always get the same amount of distortion.The resulting output would basically not have much dynamics. So the idea is, what if you sidechained the original signal back to the distorted signal using a compressor set to expand. This should have the effect of re-introducing the volume differences but retaining the same amount of distortion.
EMGs are definitely personal taste - but the height, relative to setup and picking strength, really makes a huge difference. There's a point at which they clip, at 9v, and also the distance from the string affects how bright they sound. So it's a bit of a balancing act - more so than with a passive. I set mine so they just barely clip when I hit very hard, and I really like how even they sound for regular playing. I remove the tone pots as that increases the output, brightness, and dynamic range before clipping slightly.
Because I tend to move about a fair bit musically I like my guitar sound to kind of stay in its own pocket so it's not wildly going from a booming low B to cut your head off plain strings, and I find EMGs, having less deep lows and less high highs, and also slightly less dynamic range, work a bit better.
I'm personally not a fan of compressors at all for high gain rhythm playing, just because they get so fiddly to set in a way that doesn't suck all the power out of harder played chords. The fact that EMGs clip works better for me than a compressor, but setting it all up can be fiddly, and the feel and tone is not the same as passive at all.
What you (and I) need is a compressor-expander with an insert loop, or possibly just an expander with an external detection input which you can feed from the pre-distortion signal, since there may be no need to compress before high-gain distortion at all.
I have no idea if such a thing is available in pedal form...
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
https://wiki.fractalaudio.com/axefx2/index.php?title=Controllers_and_modifiers
I wonder if the Helix or other units can do similar?
With plugins I'd start with side-chaining from a DI and see how that goes
Check out big Al at 3.40
Sounds terrible with the envelope following the attack of the guitar, it's way too fast. If you hold a chord it'll fade itself out, which I doubt you'd want at the speed strings decay on the guitar!
So you need to apply some sort of damping to the envelope. And that makes it pretty hard to get right, I guess you'd need 2 way damping, so it gets louder faster than it gets quieter. Otherwise it's hard to get it to work exactly as I'd want. Such are the limitations of the guitar attack envelope.
Plus having the sound compressed into the amp does sound pretty flat and weak, you need some amount of transient power to get the amp to crunch up properly.
It's a cool concept, but I can't help but think a better compromise is a post distortion volume pedal