John Dolmayan

The "Army Man" is a crusty old Western Electric frankenstein broadcast tube compressor I dragged out of an old radio guy's garage in Pasadena around 20 years ago. It has exposed wiring which I have not covered up, making it extremely dangerous when children or certain drummers are around. (hah!)

I have not done any maintenance to make this ancient compressor work properly. In fact, I don't want it to work properly because it makes anything you run through sound furry and explosive. For example, I'll route a mono drum room mic through it for extreme compression. Doing this makes the drums feel exciting without accentuating the high end on the cymbals. I might also go for the same effect on vocals and guitars, but in these cases it must be pushed to the absolute extreme to deliver the goods!

During a session, Serge from SOAD stuck a little toy army man in it, thus the nickname "Army Man" was born. That little toy soldier has has lived in there ever since and he must be doing a great job of guarding those precious components, it has never let us down.

This compressor was used all over the System Of A Down record, so much so that it probably would have been impossible to create the overall sound of that album without it.