Product Overview
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 CS-3 has been around for nearly four decades so it doesn’t need much introduction. It may be different than other compressor circuits you have seen/built in that it utilizes a high quality Voltage Controlled Amplifier to produce the compression rather than the ubiquitous optical and transistor based ones so prevalent in DIY. The VCA does have it’s own sound, in a way. Not as colorful as optical and perhaps not as dynamic as some transistor based compressors. It lives in another place: a very even response compressor with seemingly endless sustain at the highest settings. The addition of the active tone control really helps this one come alive. If you love compression, then I think you’ll find this a very worthy addition to your collection.
The original through-hole CS-3 used all SIP op-amps and an older version of the THAT VCA. The Oracle has been converted to DIP op-amps using modern equivalents.
Controls
- LVL: Output level.
- SUS: Compression amount.
- TONE: Active tone cut/boost.
- ATTACK: Controls the amount of picking dynamics present in the compression output from slow to fast response.
