Visual Sound Route 66 Compressor

I recently purchased the Route 66 and have been quite pleased. It was easy to begin tweaking the gain to just push a nice juicy tube amp. The manual gives a few examples but overall sparse. Simple, clean set up.

I'm running this with a jeckyll&hyde, various stomp boxes, and eq, etc, into a hot rod deluce. The unit is whisper queit, the noise suppressor all but silenced my humming lead channels on my setup. It adds the right amount of sparkle to any tone, just seems to "electrify" the strings, ala jimmy herring, pushing the amp a bit. I'm currently in a modern country project and its easy to get that bite and spank. However, its been dialed in for live funk, rock, and blues applications and its easy to quickly tweak on the fly. I haven't turned it off since I got it.

It seems rock solid and settles nicely in my pedalboard taking up litte room. I'm not at all worried about it fritzing out. If you dial a nice tube amp you can often get that needed compression without a comp if necessary.

This little box has quickly entered the starting rotation for my gigging needs. It has really evened out my overall tone and approach. Very professional, tight, and clean sounding. The tone/off&on switch is very handy, when off, it just adds the comp and gain, letting a very clean tone thru. The tone function does color your attack and bite, sometimes a bit glassy, but I quickly found a nice medium and usually play with it on.

I've compared this side by side with several mxr's, bosses, electro-harmonix, and others. It has complimented my sound the best. I find it to let me forget about worrying about tone and just concentrate on playing.

It is fairly easy to get a good rock tone out of the pedal.The manual tells you a little, but not much, there are not loads of tones in this pedal, It shows how to adjust a noise reduction unit on the circuit board, I tried to get the back off to see what the circuit board looked like compared to a home made pedal, but alas, could not get the screws off and i did not want to mess the unit up in case I had to send it back. The second screw was stripped, just kept spinning, so I gave up on that. There were lots of resistors and caps, but I don't know what kind, no ca3080 chip like in most dyna clones, it is supposed to sound like a Ross or a Dyna comp if you turn the tone control off, it doesn't. It does compress, but it is really loud compression, like listening to Santana, not a country comp.

I used it with an Alvarez Dread with a Fishman NeoD pup in it and played it thru a Kustom KGA10FX, an amp I love. It is not noisey, only when you play thru it, it gets super loud before it compresses, it forgets to compress until it is real loud, this box is powerful, my speaker was shaking with the clean vol on 4. Don't like the pedal knob you step on to turn it on and off, doesn't always work, you have to hit it just so. I tried to get some chicken picken tones, with the Ross switch on or off, I couldn't get any, It is aimed at a different voice, like hard rock.I got frustrated and pulled out my Hartman Compressor, (orange squeezer tone), put it at familiar settings and started chickin pickin'(so I hadn't lost it. I had e-mailed this company before I did my pedal review. They said this pedal was better than a Keeley, so I said, send me one and the guy responded, I don't have any. It did take a while before they went into production.

It looks like a well built pedal, looked like it was given a reliced look, you know, like a pedal that has been used. I would not gig with it.

The guys responded to my questions before the comp came out, and seem to be available. It does not sound like any compressor that I have ever heard or played, all that I can think of is a rock guitarist playing a lead with it.

I play country music and some southern rock, I have been playing for over 25 years, I sent it back to MF. I had heard a lot of good things about the original pedal (Rt 66) that had both a comnpressor on one side and an overdrive ts808 on the other side. I did not find any difference in the sound when I hit the switch that turned the tone control off. Just be careful, this thing is loaded, don't blow a speaker and watch the volume of other pedals.AHH, I just remembered something neat, when I had the gain and compress up pretty far, i hit a note and it just hung in the air, like Hendrix putting his guitar up to the amp, neat, but I don't do that.