Brown Alert??? Cloning Lovetone's Brown Source

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" - that elusive distortion tone that so many rock guitarists try to achieve. The term itself was originally coined by Eddie Van Halen, and many different pedals, amps, and combinations thereof have been used over the decades to try and find that perfect organic tone. Actual vintage Lovetone pedals start at $700 and go up into low four-digits from there, so this is yet another pedal screaming for a decent clone. In July of last year, AionFX released four Lovetone clones, including one of the Doppelganger which I completed last year and posted a review of in October. This project, the Obelisk, was released at the same time, and I finally managed to get it completed!

As you can see from the photo of the PCB above, this build was a lot easier than the Quadratron clone of the Doppelganger. The parts count is much lower, although you do have to be very careful making sure you align and solder the 4-position rotary switch correctly. 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.

I decided to do something fun with the name, and as a 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!