Strymon Compadre: The Compressor That Replaced Strymon’s First Pedal

Every pedal company has an origin story, and most of them are told in the past tense. Strymon’s origin story had a part number. In July 2009, a small outfit in Westlake Village, California — a division of an amp-modelling company called Damage Control Engineering — released a single grey-and-orange box called the OB.1 Optical Compressor & Clean Boost. It was the first thing they ever sold under the Strymon name. Some of the very first Strymon customers in the world were people who bought a compressor.

Then, on 13 March 2020, Strymon published a short and slightly mournful blog post announcing that the OB.1 was dead. Not because it had stopped selling. Because they could no longer reliably buy the part it was built around. The light dependent resistor — the little photocell-and-lamp assembly that gives optical compressors their soft, unhurried squeeze — had become impossible to source in consistent quantities. Strymon could not build the pedal in regular numbers any more, so they stopped building it at all.

Six weeks later, in late April 2020, the Compadre Dual Voice Compressor & Boost arrived at $299. It occupies the same conceptual space as the OB.1 — compression plus boost, front of chain, always on — and shares almost nothing with it electrically. Where the OB.1 was optical, the Compadre is VCA-based. Where the OB.1 had one compression character, the Compadre has two. Where the OB.1 was a single-footswitch pedal, the Compadre splits compression and boost onto independent switches and then, in a move nobody saw coming from an all-analog stompbox, adds MIDI and 300 preset locations.

Six and a half years on, in September 2026, it is still on Strymon’s site at the same $299, still listed in stock, sitting in a Drive & Compression category alongside the Sunset, the Riverside, and the newer Canoga and Fairfax. That is a long run for a compressor pedal in a market that turns over fast.

Where the Compadre Came From

The OB.1 Problem

It is worth understanding why the OB.1 had to die, because it explains most of what the Compadre is.

Optical compression works by turning the audio signal into light. A lamp or LED brightens as the signal gets louder; a photoresistor sitting next to it drops in resistance as the light hits it; that changing resistance pulls the signal level down. The reason players love optical compressors is that this whole process is physically lazy. The lamp takes time to brighten and longer to dim, and it does not respond in a straight line. The result is a compressor with a soft knee and a naturally sagging release that nobody had to program — it is simply how the parts behave. Transparent, forgiving, never quite catching the transient.

The problem is that this behaviour lives in a component that is not really a standard part. LDRs are not something a manufacturer can order from three interchangeable suppliers. They vary between batches, they have to be matched, and by the late 2010s the global supply had thinned out considerably. Strymon’s post was blunt about it: they were unable to maintain a consistent supply, and so they could not build the pedal in regular quantities.

That is a supply-chain story, not a design story, and Strymon’s engineering response was to stop chasing the part and go after the behaviour instead.

Choosing the VCA

The Compadre is built around a voltage controlled amplifier. A VCA is a gain block whose gain is set by a control voltage rather than by a knob or a photocell. Feed it a control voltage derived from the signal’s own level and you have a compressor — and, crucially, you have a compressor whose attack, release, knee and ratio are all decided by the designer rather than by the physics of a lamp.

This is the same family of circuit that sits inside a great deal of classic studio hardware: the bus compressors on large-format consoles, the rack units that engineers reach for on drums and vocals. Strymon have said the Compadre project began with a study of some of the finest analog compressors ever made, and that using a VCA is what let them tune the exact response and dynamics they wanted for each voicing. That is the trade they made. They gave up the happy accident of the optical circuit and bought back total control.

The signal path is entirely analog from input to output — Class A JFET input, VCA compression, analog boost, diode clipping, no conversion to digital at any point. The digital part of the pedal exists purely to generate control voltages. Digital control messages become analog control voltages, which is how you get recallable presets and MIDI on a pedal whose audio never touches a converter. It is an unusual bit of engineering, and it is the single thing that separates the Compadre from every other well-regarded compressor at its price.

Two Voices, One Reason

Strymon did not build one compressor. They built two and gave you a toggle.

Studio is the mode aimed at the sound of vintage rack compression and console bus compression — smooth, musical, transparent, the effect you notice mainly when you switch it off. It is the closest thing on the pedal to the OB.1’s character, and it is the reason a lot of Compadre owners never move the switch.

Squeeze is the pedal compressor. Harder, more obvious, more sustain, the classic stompbox effect with a compressed attack and a long tail. Strymon paid particular attention to the decay in this mode — the detection circuit was tuned specifically so that heavy compression could be applied without the pumping and breathing artefacts that give cheap compressors away.

Guitar Player, reviewing it, landed on the compliment that most accurately describes what a good always-on compressor does: they called it adept at that “didn’t know I couldn’t live without it until I turned it off” thing. That is a fair summary of Studio mode with the Compression knob at nine o’clock.

Specifications

Famous Players: An Honest Accounting

This is the part of the article where a gear feature normally lists four or five household names and moves on. The Compadre does not support that, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest, so here is what the record actually shows.

Four names are suggested: Brent Mason, Brad Paisley, John Mayer and Lowell George. Every one of them is a legitimate compressor player. Not one of them is a documented Compadre user.

The Lowell George entry is the clearest case. George died in June 1979. The Compadre was released in April 2020, forty-one years later. His famous compressed slide tone came from a very different world — an early stompbox compressor into a Dual Showman, plus the physical compression of a heavy-gauge string under a Sears socket wrench. He could not have played this pedal and no source claims he did.

Brent Mason, Brad Paisley and John Mayer are all associated with compression in a much more real way, but with specific and well-documented boxes that are not this one. Mason’s Nashville session tone is welded to a particular vintage stompbox compressor that has been part of his chain for decades. Paisley’s board has been photographed repeatedly and its compression comes from elsewhere. Mayer’s compressor choices have changed several times across his signature-pedal era and have been covered in detail by interviewers, and the Compadre has not appeared among them.

What the crowd-sourced gear databases actually return for the Compadre, as of this writing, is a single confirmed artist entry — the Japanese player Ejima Harushi. One. For a pedal that has been in continuous production for six and a half years and is widely praised by reviewers, that is a striking number, and it is worth explaining rather than hiding.

Why a Great Compressor Has No Famous Users

There is a structural reason, and it applies to almost every compressor ever made.

Rig rundowns and pedalboard photos capture what is visible and what is talked about. A guitarist will happily spend five minutes of an interview on a fuzz pedal, because the fuzz is the sound. Nobody spends five minutes on the compressor at the front of the chain, because the compressor is not a sound — it is a condition. It changes how the amp responds. It sits under everything. When it is working properly it is inaudible as an effect, and when the player describes their tone they credit the amp, or the pickups, or the drive pedal that the compressor is quietly making sound better.

Add to that the fact that the Compadre is an enclosure with no visual drama — a plain box in a sea of plain boxes at the top left corner of a board — and you have a pedal that is used far more than it is documented. Compare the situation with the MXR Dyna Comp, which has an enormous documented user list. That is not because the Dyna Comp is better. It is because it has been in production since 1972 and has had five decades of interviews to accumulate mentions.

The honest conclusion is this: the Compadre has no famous-player story, and buying it on the strength of one would be buying a story that does not exist. What it has instead is an unusually consistent press record. Guitarist praised the way the boost and compression sections mesh into a front end that brings out the best in an amp. Premier Guitar noted that it balances classic compression formulas without overwhelming you with options. MusicRadar called it an ideal one-box solution and an obvious candidate for always-on duty. Reviewers who use pedals professionally rate it highly. Interview transcripts simply do not talk about compressors.

Tone Recipes and Settings

The Compadre is easier to dial than most compressors because two of the hardest parameters — threshold and makeup gain — are handled automatically. You are not balancing four interacting controls. You are choosing a voice, choosing how much, and deciding how much dry signal to leave alone.

How It Compares

Buying Guide

New

$299 direct from Strymon and from authorised dealers, unchanged since launch, which after six years of general price inflation across the pedal market is effectively a price cut. Availability is good; this is not a limited or rotating product. A power supply is not included, and this matters — see below.

Used

Used Compadres turn up regularly and typically trade at a meaningful discount to new. Because the enclosure is a standard Strymon medium box with no moving parts beyond two switches, three toggles and six pots, there is very little to go wrong. Check the two footswitches for reliable engagement, check that both toggles seat firmly in each position, and check the rear Boost Type switch specifically, since it is the least-used control and therefore the most likely to have been ignored by the previous owner.

Who Should Buy It

The Compadre makes most sense for three kinds of player. First, anyone building a permanent always-on front end and wanting compression and boost handled properly in one enclosure. Second, anyone already running a MIDI pedalboard who wants their compression settings to change with the rest of the rig. Third, players who need genuinely different compression characters in the same set — a transparent Studio setting for rhythm and a hard Squeeze setting for a clean lead section — without carrying two compressors.

Who Should Not

If you want a specific vintage compressor character, buy that character. If you have no board-space constraint and no MIDI, cheaper pedals will get you most of the way. And if you are shopping for a compressor because a famous player’s name is attached to it, the Compadre is the wrong pedal — there is no such name here, and that is the honest answer.

Ownership Notes

Power is not optional and not casual. Minimum 150 mA at 9V DC centre-negative, standard 5.5 mm x 2.1 mm barrel. There is no battery compartment, so the pedal simply does not function without a supply. A daisy chain shared with several other pedals will very likely leave it short of current, and an under-powered Compadre can behave erratically rather than failing cleanly. Give it its own isolated output.

Placement. The compressor wants to be early — typically first, or immediately after a wah or tuner. The Class A JFET input is a high-impedance front end designed to see your guitar directly, and putting drives or fuzzes before it changes what the detection circuit is reacting to. The boost, notably, is fixed post-compression inside the pedal, which is the correct order and one less thing to think about.

Fuzz users, one caveat. Germanium fuzzes want to see a guitar pickup, not a buffered low-impedance output. If you run a vintage-style fuzz, it needs to go before the Compadre, which means the fuzz is no longer being compressed. This is a general truth about buffered pedals rather than a Compadre flaw, but it catches people out.

The Favorite switch is cheap flexibility. A MiniSwitch on the Fav/MIDI jack gives you one-button recall of a stored setting without needing a MIDI rig at all. For most players this is the practical version of the preset feature and costs far less than a controller.

Level is not makeup gain. Because makeup gain is automatic, the Level control is a final trim, −6 to +6 dB, with unity at noon. If you find yourself needing to push it hard to keep volume consistent when switching the compressor in and out, the fix is usually to reduce Compression or raise Dry, not to keep turning Level up.

Frequently Asked Questions