The Mythical Burr Brown Mod + the Legendary Tape Op Mod. #DaftPunk ’s secret weapon, the #Alesis #teardown tour continues with the historic and misunderstood #3630 #compressor. Circa my grad year 2001. Nowadays people tend to shun this box as a noisy knockoff of the similar dbx unit, but it’s low prosumer price made it a staple of the new #homestudio craze. In fact, this was my first real compressor, bought used for $50 in 2003. (not counting a dbx limiter i bought broken at the same time, or an optical Joe Meek clone compressor i made earlier from online plans, which sounds cool but it was quite a cobble using pots in place of three resistors and calibrated by my experienceless ass) Now that the dbx unit can be found used for barely more, and the web is full of bad reviews from bassists that expected to use it like a pedal, it’s kinda unfairly hated. BUT THE TRUTH IS, not only was this fella a fixture of French house, but two modifications turn it into a transparent surgical tool. Firstly, folks made an easy snip and disabled the Gate feature, which seems to cloud up the sound. Ballers like your boi simply had to replace the noisy VCAs with fancier ones. (the infamous Burr-Brown mod) See, the circuit really was a dbx clone, but it had cheaper parts. You just had to replace a couple parts worth a few cents, with the same part that would cost $9 and be in an expensive unit like an Avalon. HOWEVER I actually managed to play engineer and get them to send me two as free samples. Man online was different then. fyi the other fancy chip to swap in there was made by a company called ‘THAT’. They probably had the worst SEO ever. I did the gate cut too, but i repurposed my power switch to make it optional, because it’s a fun feature and underrated for glitchy verby drums. I added a new power switch above. I also cut some vent holes above the 78/79 series regulators, for paranoia. had to replace a blown #capacitor too.
