Doesn't using a compressor train you to be a sloppy player?

[FuzzFace]

Thank-you everyone!

[beleg]

I am not sure, but I found this article on compression and the "loudness war" very interesting. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_wars

[Oldrottenhead]

 i learned how to be a sloppy player with no fx whatsoever.

[Flash Harry]

This is a whole can of worms.

Modern music and modern music reproduction kit (unless you pay a lot of money) seems to like to have everything slammed into a compressor/limiter (listen to just about anything by Eric Prydz) and a homogenous loudness seems to be the order of the day.

Listen to a piece of my favourite music, Appalachian Spring - and some of the passages are lost on modern kit.

One reason I like a single instrument/single voice is because you can hear the dynamics of the playing and the singing.

I use a compressor with my bass because I have  to compete with the rest of the instrumentation and the decay of the played note is far more controllable with a compressor.

A friend of mine (yes I have one) paid nine grand for a pair of speakers, and thats nine grand sterling. You don't notice how good they are until you hear someone like Lizz Wright singing with a guitar, acoustic bass and just a pair of floor toms as percussion. Have a listen to 'A taste of Honey'. Sublime.
You can hear the sound that the percussionist makes as he drags his hand across the skins.

So no, I don't think that this is true, there are other factors that are found in modern recordings/techniques that make for sloppy play.

My excuse is lack of practice.

[Greeny]

I think compression can help hide / patch up little inconsistencies and make things sound bit more professional, but it'll never hide the fact that a particular song or piece of music is just plain bad. It's the quality of the songwriting rather than the sound that is always the bottom line for me.

I'm not a fan of compression myself, and rarely feel the need to go down that route. When it comes to acoustic-based music, I always hanker after a very pure, 'live' sound - easier said than done sometimes.

And I like a little 'sloppiness'. It gives music some humanity. Giving it a bland, homogenous sheen just leaves me cold...

[FuzzFace]

I agree with Flash Harry's comment that it's good for bass, or anything that I would consider "supporting" sounds.  Because yes a certain level of sloppiness is actually desirable, but not to the point where tracks are competing for attention, à la Deep Purple "Can we get everything louder than everything else?"

[guitarron]

when i used to play country, i'd use a boss cs1 comp pedal on the clean tele to help keep the notes from dying out-nothing like playing clean to expose sloppiness-compressor or not
sometimes comp is a necessary evil sometimes-depends on how it's being used