Madbean Pedals Rough Cut

WE ARE EXTREMELY EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE THE 'NEW FOR 2025' COLLABORATION WITH MADBEAN PEDALS! Fantastic DIY pedal projects, now available as full or partial Small Bear kits!

Our Partial Kits include the PCB/PCB Set and all parts needed for the project, except you supply your own enclosure and knobs. 

Our Full Kit includes the PCB/PCB Set, all the parts, a drilled enclosure and knobs. 

You can always check out the MadBean Forum for more info-- a great resource! MadBean Pedals Forum

Overview

The Rough Cut is an amalgamation of the variations/mods of the Diamond Compressor™ for guitar. It’s a very clean and articulate optical compressor that has incredibly smooth envelope response. It’s a great sounding, modern optical compressor for guitar so if you like the squishy squish this one is for you!

The Rough Cut includes mods featured in different versions which allows one to bypass the EQ circuit altogether or add a bit of high cut. For the 2024 version, this has been made accessible via an inexpensive internal slide switch.

The Rough Cut only has one tweak from the stock design - the EQ bypass switch has been reduced from a DPDT to SPDT. In the stock unit, the DPDT does a full EQ bypass by disconnecting R19 (my schematic). However, this leads to an annoying “pop” when the switch is engaged due to the voltage differences on that side of the switch. Changing this to an SPDT to bypass only the output of the EQ circuit eliminates the pop and there is no difference at all in tone at all by leaving the front end of the EQ circuit active in the bypass mode (at least as far as I can tell).

Controls

• VOL: Total output.
• COMP: CCW: least compression, CW: highly compressed.
• EQ: CCW: treble cut, CW: treble boost.
• EQ BYP : This switch bypasses the EQ circuit.
• HI CUT: This switch can be used to cut a bit of treble content (can be used in either EQ or EQ bypass mode). For the 2024 version, it has been made an internal slide switch.

Rough Cut Build Guide

Rough Cut Schematic