Fingolfen
Well-known member
So, I'm going to chalk this up as one of the pedals with one of the worst names, yet having one of the best sounds out there. The Lovetone Brown Source was originally released in 1995, and tried to capture the "brown sound." Disclaimer, I'm a horse owner, and have to deal with a source of "brown" way too often... That being said, actual vintage Lovetone pedals start at $700 and go up into low four-digits from there, so this is a pedal screaming for a decent clone. In July of last year, AionFX released four Lovetone including the Brown Source as the "Obelisk" - so I figured I'd give it a go!
The PCB is fairly simple as Lovetone clones go - I've build the clone of the Doppelganger - which was a beast (I may post that one later). You do have to be careful making sure you align and solder the 4-position rotary switch correctly, though. As this is a more recent pedal, I just went with all modern components for the build. The resistors are all metal film 1% tolerance (mostly Yageo). The film capacitors are all modern metal film (mostly WIMA as you can tell by the sea of red), and the electrolytic capacitors are Nichicon. There are only a couple of diodes on the board itself, and I used new production 1N914s for those. The one transistor is a BC549C soldered directly into the board.
Figuring I couldn't come up with a worse name than "Brown Source," I decided to have some fun with the enclosure. I'm a big fan of the old Firefly TV show, I decided to keep the "Brown" allusion - hence the "Browncoat." Sound-wise, this pedal really ticks all of the boxes. It gives you that great distortion sound like EVH, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, or even Alex Lifeson in the Snakes and Arrows phase, but it does so with a reasonable noise floor, unlike the very noisy Sabbra Cadabra I recently built a clone of. I'm not sure what I expected from this pedal. Lovetone pedals generally have a great reputation, and I should have known that it would end up being fairly special, but I guess I had some lingering doubts. Consider those doubts dispelled!
I just finished up a second one of these for a friend, and it gets delivered this week... hope he likes it!
A little more at the blog...
The PCB is fairly simple as Lovetone clones go - I've build the clone of the Doppelganger - which was a beast (I may post that one later). You do have to be careful making sure you align and solder the 4-position rotary switch correctly, though. As this is a more recent pedal, I just went with all modern components for the build. The resistors are all metal film 1% tolerance (mostly Yageo). The film capacitors are all modern metal film (mostly WIMA as you can tell by the sea of red), and the electrolytic capacitors are Nichicon. There are only a couple of diodes on the board itself, and I used new production 1N914s for those. The one transistor is a BC549C soldered directly into the board.
Figuring I couldn't come up with a worse name than "Brown Source," I decided to have some fun with the enclosure. I'm a big fan of the old Firefly TV show, I decided to keep the "Brown" allusion - hence the "Browncoat." Sound-wise, this pedal really ticks all of the boxes. It gives you that great distortion sound like EVH, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, or even Alex Lifeson in the Snakes and Arrows phase, but it does so with a reasonable noise floor, unlike the very noisy Sabbra Cadabra I recently built a clone of. I'm not sure what I expected from this pedal. Lovetone pedals generally have a great reputation, and I should have known that it would end up being fairly special, but I guess I had some lingering doubts. Consider those doubts dispelled!
I just finished up a second one of these for a friend, and it gets delivered this week... hope he likes it!
A little more at the blog...
