JangleBox Acousticomp

The JangleBox Acousticomp is a compressor/sustainer pedal voiced specifically for acoustic guitar, released by the boutique pedal company JangleBox. Compression is, as Acoustic Guitar's Doug Young put it, "one often-overlooked effect" for acoustic players: it evens out the dynamics of a performance so quiet notes and hard-strummed chords sit at a more consistent level. The Acousticomp was priced at $265 at the time of its December 2024 review¹.

Controls and how it works

The pedal keeps its control set focused on what an acoustic player needs:

• Sustain: determines how hard the unit drives the soft-knee compression. Soft-knee compression eases into its full effect as the signal gets louder, which tends to sound gentler than hard compression that clamps down abruptly¹.
• Mix: blends a portion of your natural, uncompressed sound back in with the compressed signal¹.
• Footswitch: activates or bypasses the effect¹.

The mix control matters for acoustic use. Compression can flatten the natural attack and breathing of an acoustic guitar, so being able to keep some of the unprocessed signal in the blend lets the instrument retain part of its own character while still gaining the evening-out effect¹.

What reviewers said

Acoustic Guitar's reviewer, Doug Young, found that with more subtle settings, including leveraging the mix control to retain a portion of the natural sound, guitars sounded fatter and fuller with increased sustain¹.

That verdict points to the pedal's intended use: light to moderate compression rather than heavy squashing. For acoustic players looking to even out fingerstyle dynamics or add sustain to a flatpicked part, the review suggests the Acousticomp delivers its effect while keeping the instrument's natural sound in the picture¹.

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