Fingolfen
Well-known member
Once again I'm just gobsmacked by the coolness of Lovetone pedals, and the fact that I can build a clone that sounds pretty much like the real thing. This one is built on the AionFX Monolith board, and this is one of the few cases where I just sort of kept the original project name and ran with it... pretty much to Jupiter and beyond...
The circuit board for the Monolith isn't terribly complex, and doesn't even have a lot of oddball resistor and capacitor values like you'd see on a Cornish build. Per the Aion build manual:
For this build I went ahead and stuck with modern components, since the pedal was originally released in 1995. The trimmer resistor toward the top of the board is only used for the "Cheese" mode - which is one of the four tone modes controlled by the tone switch. The "Cheese" mode pushes the transistor clipping into instability which causes signal breakup. I also went ahead and built the pedal with the optional boost stage.
For the pedal and enclosure itself, I had to come up with a decent name, but honestly AionFX sort of came through this time. I'm a big sci-fi fan, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite films of all time so I decided to run with that theme. Rather than just going with basic black monolith, I decided to instead have the enclosure represent the "hyperspace" scene from late in the movie. This let me add some text and color to the enclosure, and I even matched the knob colors to the prevailing hyperspace colors in that part of the enclosure. The enclosure has a red LED with, of course, HAL 9000 underneath it. Yes, I'm a geek!
As to the sound of the pedal, honestly it sounds pretty much exactly like the demos of the real thing I've seen. Given I actually started out in "Cheese" mode (I thought I was in tone bypass), I was initially quite worried I'd done something terribly wrong, but as it turns out the opposite was true. This is a great fuzz pedal, and it will likely start seeing some real use on my board.
A little more at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2022/06/cloning-lovetones-big-cheese-another.html
The circuit board for the Monolith isn't terribly complex, and doesn't even have a lot of oddball resistor and capacitor values like you'd see on a Cornish build. Per the Aion build manual:
For this build I went ahead and stuck with modern components, since the pedal was originally released in 1995. The trimmer resistor toward the top of the board is only used for the "Cheese" mode - which is one of the four tone modes controlled by the tone switch. The "Cheese" mode pushes the transistor clipping into instability which causes signal breakup. I also went ahead and built the pedal with the optional boost stage.
For the pedal and enclosure itself, I had to come up with a decent name, but honestly AionFX sort of came through this time. I'm a big sci-fi fan, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite films of all time so I decided to run with that theme. Rather than just going with basic black monolith, I decided to instead have the enclosure represent the "hyperspace" scene from late in the movie. This let me add some text and color to the enclosure, and I even matched the knob colors to the prevailing hyperspace colors in that part of the enclosure. The enclosure has a red LED with, of course, HAL 9000 underneath it. Yes, I'm a geek!
As to the sound of the pedal, honestly it sounds pretty much exactly like the demos of the real thing I've seen. Given I actually started out in "Cheese" mode (I thought I was in tone bypass), I was initially quite worried I'd done something terribly wrong, but as it turns out the opposite was true. This is a great fuzz pedal, and it will likely start seeing some real use on my board.
A little more at the blog: https://steggostudios.blogspot.com/2022/06/cloning-lovetones-big-cheese-another.html
