The Pedal Board's New Groove - Way Huge Red Llama Clone!

So here was a fun, easy, and fast build for a really neat little pedal. The Aion Yacana is a slightly modified version of the Way Huge Red Llama, originally released in 1992. There's actually a decent demo video of the pedal on YouTube that I recommend for anyone looking to build this pedal. If you turn the drive knob down, it basically puts more signal into your amp while retaining your amp's intrinsic character. If you start adding drive, it will add some hair / distortion to the signal as you start bringing in the IC on board (that does most of the heavy lifting for the effect pedal). Aion FX version adds a boost toggle switch not on the original that provides additional gain ranges. This primarily impacts the range of the drive knob, and based on my test compared to the demo video, the downmost position appears to mirror the basic pedal most closely.

In terms of construction, there's not a lot that's tricky here. It's a dead simple beginner pedal with an extremely low component count (as you can tell by the nearly bare red board above). For anyone looking for their first pedal - this one is a great place to start. Based on the Sweetwater listing, the Red Llama (at least in its original form) isn't available anymore and prices have started to creep north of $220 on Reverb - making this an ideal pedal to clone for a lot cheaper!

For the enclosure I decided to do something a little fun. I found fonts that closely resembled the original, and then decided to add an image of Kuzco in Llama form from the Disney Movie, The Emperor's New Groove. Obviously if I ever decide to sell any of these I'm going to have to come up with a different Llama to put on them, but for personal use I figured the House of Mouse wouldn't come after me. I also found some knobs that closely resemble the Way Huge style knobs, but in a smaller form factor as I'm using a 125B enclosure rather than the, well, way huge one that the original pedal is in!