Visual Sound Comp 66

The Visual Sound Comp 66 is a compressor pedal that puts the compressor channel of Visual Sound's Route 66 stompbox into its own enclosure. Premier Guitar notes that since the Route 66's introduction in 1999, its fans had been requesting the compressor channel as a standalone pedal, and the Comp 66 answered that¹. Vintage Guitar reviewed it in March 2009 as part of the launch of Visual Sound's V2 series pedals, which arrived with die-cast aluminum chassis, hand-wired jacks and a new tone buffer circuit².

The pedal covers a wide compression range. Vintage Guitar found it delivers "everything from a light 'fattening' compression to a heavy, squashed chicken-pickin' signal"².

What it does

The Comp 66 is a studio-compressor style pedal aimed at guitarists who want evenness and sustain without an obvious coloration of the tone. Its three knobs divide the work: Compression sets how hard the signal is squeezed, Gain sets the output level, and Tone shapes the sound, with a mini toggle that takes the Tone control out of the circuit entirely when you want the compressor's effect on its own².

Vintage Guitar's reviewer put the range to the test across settings:

• Light settings give a subtle fattening of the signal rather than an obvious squash²
• Heavy settings produce the compressed, squashed sound associated with chicken-pickin' country playing²
• The Tone toggle lets you bypass the tone shaping and hear the compression on its own²

The pedal launched as one of three V2 series releases in March 2009, alongside the Route 808 overdrive and the Visual Volume pedal, at a list price of $119.95².

Versions and editions

The Comp 66 story continues past the original Visual Sound version. Visual Sound later became Truetone, and the pedal exists in the maker's archive as the V2 Comp 66, with Truetone describing it as having "remarkably low noise, high musicality, and equally at home on guitar or bass"³.

Premier Guitar reviewed the Visual Sound V2 Comp 66 at an MSRP of $178¹. That review found it produces "warm, uncolored studio-compressor style compression," and with the tone control off the reviewer called it "one of the most transparent pedal compressors I have ever heard, what goes in, comes out"¹. The V2 has a single Comp knob rather than a full control set: there is no attack control, and the attack time is slow at lower compression settings and gets faster as the Comp knob is turned up¹. Backing the compression control all the way off turns the pedal into a clean boost¹. The reviewer also found that cranking the Comp knob made it easy to get a Dyna Comp-like squeeze, with added compression increasing sustain and evening out chord voices¹.

The compressor channel also lives on inside the Route 66 line. The V2 Route 66 carried both channels with the V2 Series integrated noise reduction system⁴, and the V3 Route 66, released in January 2015, moved to a more traditional rectangular casing after the pentagonal V1 and V2 enclosures, with much of that update aimed at bolstering the compressor's quality and functionality⁵. That pedal is covered on its own page, the Visual Sound V3 Route 66 American Overdrive.

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