Cloning Lovetone's Big Cheese - Another Great Pedal with an Odd Name

Fuzz pedals were one of the first effects pedals released and come in an absolutely dizzying array of different takes on the classic tone. One of the more famous boutique fuzz pedals out there is the Lovetone Big Cheese, which in my humble opinion is a far better name than the Brown Source, but still keeps the theme of odd pedal names. When AionFX released their clones of four famous Lovetone pedals, I picked up their Monolith project which is an "exact adaptation of the Big Cheese except for the addition of an optional boost stage... for additional volume." I'd had some issues trying to create a decaled enclosure, so I finally threw in the towel and had one UV printed. The enclosure finally arrived, and I've managed to get this pedal boxed. If you can find an original Big Cheese, it will set you back at least $1500, though there are some apparently commercial clones available for ~$175 (though I'm not sure how accurate they are).

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:

"The Big Cheese is a hybrid of several different circuit topologies. An op-amp provides input buffering and output gain recovery, and a silicon transistor fuzz resembling a Fuzz Face or Tone Bender is sandwiched in the middle. This is followed by diode hard clipping and a Big Muff-style tone control."

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. The transistors are BC549 just like in the original - this is one time AionFX doesn't actually recommend the US equivalent or a substitute. 

As with the Brown Source clone, everything fits neatly into a 125B enclosure, but there is no room to fit a battery because of the large four position switch. As you can see from the photo I didn't give myself a lot of wiring allowance on the +9V line, but it managed to reach, so after breathing a sigh of relief I finished wiring the rest of the pedal. As always, I'm wrapping all of the jack connections in heat shrink tubing to protect them.

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. I'm planning on building more for sale as well, and I may even offer it in my own Cheese Source deal where you can get a Browncoat and Monolith in a package deal (I haven't decided whether or not to combine them in one pedal yet - a Mono-coat???).