Guitar Nerds Anonymous

@Dooks, if you are doing 50s stuff a compressor might not be what your looking for. If you have a small valve amp, I will assume you are pushing it to get a nice valve driven tone. Unfortunately you cant add much more in volume, it will just clip/add more gain.
What does work really nicely is backing off the volume on your guitar. This cuts the input, effectively cutting the gain on the amp. You wont lose much volume at first, it should just clean your signal. This is the old school way of doing it, saves you some money and the cleaner tone can often sound a lot nicer because the amp is still cooking without being overdriven.
With regards a compressor for 50s stuff. You would have to spend a lot of dollar on one that wont kill the sparkle that 50s music needs. A top boost will just drive your amp, an EQ pedal might work if your amp has a FX loop. Maybe try the BBE sonic stomp for added sparkle.

So you've never used compression as a boost? Hmmm, you're missing out I reckon! I think it works a treat. Especially one with a tone control because as you say, you can lose some top-end.

I get what you're saying and I think it might work with bigger cleaner amps (certainly did with my old Pro Reverb) but I'm playing a tele into a 30w WEM Dominator with a 15" speaker. It's crazy loud for a 30w amp. For the 50s stuff I run it dead clean but up pretty loud (with slap-back, reverb and tremolo of course!) and kick in the compression when it comes to solos or instrumental parts. It boosts the volume, gives it a nice smooth punch and really cuts though without breaking up. which is everything i need. I'm just after a nicer, less flimsy example of the same.

I've tried a straight clean volume boost and that tends to edge the amp into overdrive which (in this situation) I do not want.

For my other balls-out noise band I use similar sized amps and a clean boost into a tubescreamer for clean/a choice of two different drive sounds (just boost or just TS) and of course BOTH! for insano-sustaino.

I have an EQ pedal somewhere too. I'll try that as well but to be honest I think just adding signal (at whatever frequency) is going to result in overdrive with the amps and volume levels i'm using.

EDIT - sorry just saw some of the other recomendatiuons upthread. Will looky when I get home. Thanks chaps. Folky band rehearsal calling. Gotta run.