I bought this pedal to give me more sustain and a little bit more grunge to my overdrive,it does just that and more.I was a little sceptical about it because the price was so low,but don't let that deture you, its worth it.

For perspective, I own three Danelectro boxes, a couple of MXR boxes and an Alesis Bitrman. The Danelectros are by far, the best value. They do exactly what they are supposed to.

The Surf and Turf delivers compression /sustain. The two pots to play with allow for gain adjustments, not simple volume. And amount of compression. In my chain it sits behind the EQ. The gain is widely variable, turn it down and overdrive your amp. Sensitivity allows for amount of compression - at higher levels it's very noticable. These boxes rock, for what they are.

The case is plastice, base is a metal plate. Included a battery, though I run it from my pedla board.

I got this to replace my Milkbox, as I was looking for sustain without the squashing effect. It has fewer knobs for tweaking, but it sounds great. I do use a gate, so I don't have any noise problems with it. It adds great sustain without killing the attack. Milkbox is good, but more of a limiting effect than full-on sustain.

I bought this Danelectro DJ-9 on impulse one day at the local guitar store. I had no idea what it did, because compression made no sense to me. I use it as a volume control, since I can't really see what else it does. It creates feedback on higher levels, which could be cool if you like that sort of thing. My only problem with construction is the plastic button: It's so stupid.

If you know how compressors works, you can see that it has two knobs: "Level", which will determine the signal output, either louder for boost, equal for only compression, or quieter for whatever reason. "Sensitivity" on a compressor means it will automatically compress the peak signals and boost the quieter signals - the more sensitive, the greater or tighter the compression.

This pedal works great for simply that function: transparent compression. Placed right after the instrument and before other effects, it will keep your peaks from blowing or distorting your sound, and it will keep your signal troughs louder so that you don't have to up the volume. The final product is an even, "big" sound, great for both live and recording. Great especially for acoustic.

For specific uses like extra sustain or chicken picken, use another compressor that has specific sustain, threshold and attack settings so you can really adjust your sounds.

Those who complain it's noisy either have noisy single coil pickups or are using them in the wrong order in an effects chain or just have a lemon.