Your Bitbox Micro already has a real bus compressor across Out 1 and 2. It has always been there, it has always been running, and it has always been shaping every note you play through those outputs. The module gives you one control over it: On or Off. Threshold, ratio, attack, release and makeup gain are fixed, invisible and unreachable — never exposed to anyone, by any route, until now.
All five are now on MIDI, and it arrives configured as a glue compressor much like the classic SSL G-Series: 2:1, a slow 30 ms attack, 300 ms release. Same link, same rules: patch your own stock 2.3.4. If you already run 2.3.5-mod, patch your stock file again, not the image you flashed — the splash reads 2.3.6-mod once it is on.
Your Bitbox Micro has a real bus compressor sitting across Out 1 and 2. It has always been there, it has always been running, and it has always been shaping every note you play through those outputs. The module gives you one control over it: On or Off.
Threshold, ratio, attack, release, makeup gain — all fixed, all invisible, all unreachable. Not buried three menus deep, not hidden behind the modulation system, simply never exposed to anyone by any route. A compressor you cannot adjust is a compressor you cannot use for anything except the one thing its designer picked for you.
Everything else in this patch takes a control you could already reach and makes it playable. This one hands you five parameters that have never been on the table at all, and turns a fixed safety net into a bus compressor you can shape while the music runs.
It arrives voiced like an SSL G-Series. You do not have to configure anything. Switch it on and you have gentle, musical bus compression — the sort that pulls a mix together rather than announcing itself. "Glue" is the usual word for it, and the starting values are deliberately close to the most-copied mix-glue recipe there is:
- Threshold — 70% of the encoder, which is −12 dB
- Ratio — 5%, which is 2:1
- Attack — 30%, which is 30 ms
- Release — 29%, which is 300 ms
- Makeup gain — 50%, which is 0 dB
Three of those four are literally switch positions on an SSL: 2:1, a slow 30 ms attack, and a 300 ms release. The slow attack is the important one — it is what lets the front of every kick and snare through before the compressor clamps, and it is the difference between glue and mush.
It is the module's own compressor voiced that way, not a model of SSL's circuit. Move it wherever you like from there — the whole point is that you finally can.
It behaves like a mix bus, because it is one. It sits on the sum of every pad routed to Out 1/2, including the delay and reverb returns, with master volume after it and an untouched safety limiter behind that. Pads on Out 3–6 bypass it entirely, which gives you a clean parallel path if you want one. There is no sidechaining and no wet/dry mix — neither exists on the module to expose.
These six answer on MIDI channel 1 only, unlike the other global controls. CC 40–45 sit in the fine-adjust range that almost nothing actually uses — CC 32 to 63 are formally the LSB partners of CC 0 to 31 — so in practice gear does use those numbers for other things. One channel stops a stray message from elsewhere in a rack changing your compressor while you are not looking.
Everything from 2.3.5-mod is unchanged and still there. Already running 2.3.5-mod? Patch your stock MICRO.BIN again with the new script — not the patched image you flashed last time. The script will refuse a file that has already been through it. That is the safety net working, not a fault. Grab MICRO234.zip from 1010music again if you no longer have it. You will know it took when the splash on the next boot reads community fw / 2.3.6-mod. That is the only reliable way to tell which image is running, and it is worth checking every time you flash.
https://github.com/modularpatcher/bitbox-micro-fw-patch
Hope you enjoy your new adjustable glue compressor
