Fingolfen
Well-known member
A few months ago I was looking to expand the range of distortion pedals I had available, so I went hunting through the gear used by my favorite guitarists at various points in their career. Unless you've been under a rock, you'll know I'm a huge Alex Lifeson / Rush fan, so one of the pedals I decided to build was an MXR distortion as it was one of the pedals Alex used during the Moving Pictures era. For that initial build I went with the AionFX Aphelion.
The Aphelion not only supports variations to the base circuit, but includes two extra modifications: a treble-cut switch that changes out a capacitor at the input, and a diode selector that lets you go between germanium (Distortion+), silicon (250), or LEDs. The selector switch effectively gives you three different distortion pedals in one, and it may be something I try to incorporate into the Dimetrodon Distortion later on, but I prefer my addition of a true tone knob to the simple treble cut.
Despite the variety of builds, AionFX rates this as a Beginner build. I'd tend to agree with that - at least if you're building it in the base configuration in the instructions. If you try to build one of the variants or decide to experiment with some of the diodes. The parts count is low, even with the triple diode selection. For this particular build I went with almost all modern components, and you can tell that this was the angled 10K Ohm resistor era. The only "classic" parts I used were vintage 1N914 diodes for the silicon version of the circuit.
Since I've been doing some of my own etching, I thought an etched bronze top plate would look really cool. I decided to make the pedal name an homage to Rush's final studio album - Clockwork Angels - and go with a real steampunk theme. I had a bit of an overexposure problem right along one edge of the etch, but overall I think it came out killer.
A little more at the blog...
The Aphelion not only supports variations to the base circuit, but includes two extra modifications: a treble-cut switch that changes out a capacitor at the input, and a diode selector that lets you go between germanium (Distortion+), silicon (250), or LEDs. The selector switch effectively gives you three different distortion pedals in one, and it may be something I try to incorporate into the Dimetrodon Distortion later on, but I prefer my addition of a true tone knob to the simple treble cut.
Despite the variety of builds, AionFX rates this as a Beginner build. I'd tend to agree with that - at least if you're building it in the base configuration in the instructions. If you try to build one of the variants or decide to experiment with some of the diodes. The parts count is low, even with the triple diode selection. For this particular build I went with almost all modern components, and you can tell that this was the angled 10K Ohm resistor era. The only "classic" parts I used were vintage 1N914 diodes for the silicon version of the circuit.
Since I've been doing some of my own etching, I thought an etched bronze top plate would look really cool. I decided to make the pedal name an homage to Rush's final studio album - Clockwork Angels - and go with a real steampunk theme. I had a bit of an overexposure problem right along one edge of the etch, but overall I think it came out killer.
A little more at the blog...