Despite the recent trend, I am actually still building clones of pedals that weren't produced by Boss. This build is based on the Aion Protolith, a clone of the Mad Professor Stone Grey Distortion. It was a fun (and quick) little build - especially in light of all of the recent complex pedals I've been building. The Stone Grey Distortion's lineage goes back to a circuit in a 1980s Japanese electronics book. This was adapted in 2009 by Bjorn Juhl and then sold to Mad Professor for general production in 2011.
As you can see from the PCB above, this is a fairly easy build with a low component count - although the resistor load out is somewhat unusual. Resistor one is a 14.7K Ohm - not 15K, 14.7K - so from where I sit the "Mad Professor" credentials for this pedal are well and fully intact. The original Stone Grey Distortion uses JFETs for clipping (the empty Q1 and Q2 slots in the PCB above), but AionFX recommends just going with diodes since the original design just uses the JFET's body diode. I didn't have any of the right JFETs handy, so I just went with the diodes for this build. I'm planning on picking up another one and actually getting the right transistors to see if there is any difference in the sound. Otherwise the build is really pretty straightforward.
Sound wise, it's a good distortion pedal that seems to work pretty well with my Boss Katana. AionFX indicates that the pedal tends to have a fair amount of low cut and provides options for adding more bass in the build notes. I haven't run this one through my tube amp yet, but it would be interesting to compare it to a few other distortion pedals and see how much bass it actually cuts out.
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