Rothwell - Love Squeeze Compressor

"Designed and Built in Britain"; the mark of quality and the Rothwell Love Squeeze doesn't disappoint - it's a great hand built compressor pedal with an interesting design.

Here's the description from the Rothwell website;

"The Love Squeeze is a compressor designed simply to sound right with guitars, without any bizarre “pumping” effects and without any noise.

This has been achieved by designing a circuit from scratch instead of adopting the more common approach of using an operational transconductance amplifier (for tech heads, it’s usually the CA3080 chip) or simply copying an existing design (like some American boutique makers have done) and gives the Love Squeeze a sound of its own. Low level signals can be raised by as much as 20dB without boosting high level signals, so when used in front of distortion - either in a pedal or an amp - leads lines can be fattened up without chords sending the distortion into mush.

When used with a clean sound the Love Squeeze can be set to just take off the ice-pick attack of single coil pickups for a tone a little easier on the ear. Like reverb (when used sensibly), this is a subtle effect which can go almost unnoticed until it is switched off - then you wonder how you could live without it."

Here's the ProGuitarShop demo of the Rothwell Love Squeeze in action;

And another (with the Rothwell and Keeley Compressor);

Now, check out some gut shots - notice the high quality PCBs, neat wiring and general high standard of construction throughout :-) An all round decent piece of work!

Here's a schematic drawn up by ever productive WhiteKeyHole;

It's an interesting concept and a nice simple design. The use of a FET as a voltage controlled resistor makes the attack nice and quick and cuts out the cost of an expensive LDR. If I were to compare the tone of this thing to anything else out there it would be the old traditional Orange Squeezer - it's subtle and transparent compression, it doesn't pump and breath a'la OTA designs or higher ratio optical compressors. Overall I'd say it's a very nice little "tone tidier" compressor.

For those who want to build this thing here's a vero layout from the fantastic Harald Sabro; http://www.sabrotone.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/LoveSqueeze.gif