Steggo's First Combo Pedal - The Sudden but Inevitable Betrayal

Lovetone pedals are known for several things. First off, they generally are amazingly good pedals with great sound and a lot of flexibility. Second, they often have some fairly unusual names (Big Cheese, Brown Source, etc.). Finally, they're all long out of production and original examples are incredibly expensive - with price tags ranging from several hundred dollars to around $1500. I'd previously built clones of the Brown Source (the Firefly TV show themed Browncoat) using the AionFX Obelisk board and the Big Cheese (the 2001 themed Monolith) using the AionFX Monolith board (one of the few times I've stuck with the trace name of a board for the actual pedal), and I'd been impressed with the overall quality of the pedals. Lovetone released a combination pedal with the two of these in one box (and on one board) called the "Cheese Source" - so I decided to build my first "combination" pedal bringing these two awesome effects together.

I had to make a few design decisions from the outset. The original Lovetone pedal has separate in/out jacks for both the "cheese" side and the "source" side, but it appears the cheese output is linked directly to the source input, so you could get away with just using the "in" and "out" jacks. This arrangement reminds me a bit of how the PedalPCB clone of the Mu-tron Bi-phase (the Duo-Phase) is set up. I'd considered going that direction, but ultimately decided to do something a bit different instead. While conventional wisdom indicates fuzz should go before distortion in a pedal chain, sometimes it's desirable to mix that up a bit, so I decided to add an order reversing switch to the combo pedal so either the "cheese" or the "source" can come first!

The only drawback with that plan is the order reversing switch from PedalPCB didn't have an indicator light, so you had to try and remember which of the effects was first in the chain. I thought it would be useful to add a bi-color LED to it, and with help from the great guys on the PedalPCB forum, an easy solution using a 4PDT switch was worked out (see image below - though I ultimately ended up putting the LED on the other side of the board). 

This means the pedal only has one input and one output jack. I may decide to make up a version without the order switch and the four jack configuration in the future, but for now I like the flexibility that this configuration brings. Populating the circuit boards was really the easy part of this build as I'd built both several times in the past. The wiring was a little more challenging as I wanted to lay out the enclosure a certain way. I normally solder the LEDs directly to the AionFX 3PDT daughter boards, but because of the layout, I had to run wires to one of them. Of course, the bi-color LED was hand wired to the 4PDT switch, and then I had to run extra ground and power connections. The UV printing on my first enclosure also peeled for some reason (the first time I've ever had something like that happen), but Tayda refunded me the purchase price so I could replace it. Unfortunately I'd already wired up the pedal, so I had to disconnect the DC jack, remove everything, and start over. But now I have a jig to build any additional pedals in!

Speaking of the enclosure, if you follow my Instagram feed or read my teaser post from last week, you would have seen Steggo and Rexie posing with the original mock up enclosure (below). The actual finished article is above - and it is heavy! For the enclosure I decided to stick with the Firefly / Browncoat theme of the Brown Source clone, as I could use a fun reference from the show to bring dinosaurs into the mix. I had a ton of fun getting this enclosure together.

Once the pedal was together, I needed to test it - not only to check basic functionality, but to determine which pedal came first in the chain on the two different order settings (and their corresponding color). To do that I set up my Browncoat and Monolith pedals in series, matched settings, and went by ear. I tend to like the fuzz first on many settings, but not all - and given both of these pedals have individual four-way switches controlling tone modes and even clipping response there is a host of ways to set them up. I did notice one thing though, I've used some of the AionFX mods to increase the gain of both pedals, which is great when using them alone, but when using them in series (as either the discrete pedals or this combo pedal), you have to watch those volume knobs or you can go into some overload regions your amp won't appreciate!