oh word!! that’s sick, ppl need to use cassette more it’s a rlly cool medium for a lot of stuff
me and my homies run a noise label together and we do a lot of stuff on cassette, it sounds great for underground extreme genres and it’s so much fun making cool art for the J-cards
anywho, it depends on if you’re doing things budget or not! there are sooo many budget comp options, you could genuinely just look around your local craigslist/forum/for-sale boards until a used comp of some kind pops up. Church sales are an insane place for used gear like this, it’s often in that sweetspot of decent quality gear that’s been lightly used for not much money.
One in particular that would be really nice going into tape might be the DBX 166A, and just keep it in SLOW mode with CONTOUR on (sidechain lowpass filter). It works great across a lot of material, I’ve run it for my live sets for years now, has that nice snappy DBX sound and is a sort of set-and-forget comp, and it has an extra peak limiter that is literally just a clipper which can be nice for snipping off little peaks before hitting the TASCAM pre-amps. You can find these for ~$100
There’s always the FMR RNC comps, those can usually be found for cheap and work very well, tho for your purposes I might even shoot for the RNLA over the RNC since you’re running into tape, could be a rlly fun glue comp set up. These can be like $100-$200 used if you lurk for them.
Most old behringer comps work fine, the mdx-1200, mdx-1400, mdx-2100, and mdx-2600 can all be found on reverb for ~75 bucks or even below 50, I’ve used a few of them now, and again so long as you utilize the sidechain EQ functionality they work like any old VCA comp should.
The ART opto-tube comp might be a lot of fun, i’ve heard they can be a bit bass-anemic and you might need to get some kind of outboard EQ to run the sidechain through (i’m gonna start sounding like a broken record but for mixbuss processing I cannot emphasize how important of a step this is for compressing a whole mix) but going into tape it could sound very sweet and you get a little bit of that tube tone (or something)
If you really want to get grimey you could pick up an old Alesis 3630, they’re dirt cheap (do NOT spend more than 50 bucks for one) and get a worse rap than I think they deserve, especially if you get a Rev D model. You can do the gate clip mod (very simple) or just utilize the sidechain and run it through an EQ, I find once the sidechain circuit isn’t being clogged by lowend the 3630 functions like any old VCA comp would (but maybe a bit more lofi than other options, I personally enjoy it for taste but whatever).
And also like a billion more options, sometimes I just set my Reverb on lowest-price and set the search to outboard compressors and limiters and just browse and there are dozens of choices for cheap, workhorse comps.
I will say to keep the overall compression levels below ~6db of gain reduction, and I feel this way about most comps overall, but especially with budget ones they do start to shit out above ~6db of reduction, especially when dealing with a whole mix.
Slow attack, release to taste, sidechain EQ on or set externally, Ratio between 2:1 and 4:1, and threshold pulled down until the gain reduction bounces with the song but returns down to zero before the next big sound happens, and I think running that into tape will have a pretty significant difference, regardless of what comp you end up choosing.
compressors are kind of like guitar amps where like… yeah it has a specific default “resting” state that ppl know it for, but you can tweak a lot of them very far away from their reputation.
