Old School Distortion + A Cool Enclosure!

A few weeks ago I posted the prototype of my Dimetrodon Distortion pedal, which melded a classic MXR Distortion+ pedal with a Big Muff Pi Tone stack. I have more of those coming soon, including some really fun variants, but today's subject is the very first Distortion+ variant I built together with its finally completed enclosure. A few months ago I was looking to expand the range of distortion pedals I had available, so I went hunting through the gear used by my favorite guitarists at various points in their career. Unless you've been under a rock, you'll know I'm a huge Alex Lifeson / Rush fan, so one of the pedals I decided to build was an MXR distortion as it was one of the pedals Alex used during the Moving Pictures era. For that initial build I went with the AionFX Aphelion, though I have a variety of other boards I can use (including my own) for future Distortion+ (and related) clones.

The Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress Flanger / Chorus

I'll be completely honest, I'm not a great guitar player at this point. I'm somewhere in the "intermediate" range, but I'm having a huge amount of fun learning not only guitar technique but chasing great sounds. One of the songs I've always loved is Rush's "Natural Science," and the flange effects at the beginning of it really do a lot to set the tone and mood of the piece. While no one seems to have a definitive answer (apart from Alex Lifeson, who apparently hasn't discussed / disclosed what hardware was used), the consensus is that he used an EHX Electric Mistress on the album Permanent Waves - especially on "The Spirit of Radio" (another song I need to learn...). As I'm on a massive pedal-building kick, and given one of my other guitar heroes David Gilmour also used one, I decided to build my own EHX Electric Mistress using PCB Guitar Mania's Electric Lover Flanger PCB. 

Put a Bird on It - Aion FX Cerulean

So here's another one that I'd gotten the PCB populated a few weeks ago, but just managed to finally finish up the enclosure - the Aion FX Cerulean based on the Marshall Bluesbreaker. While you can get a Marshall Bluesbreaker II pedal for a quite reasonable price, original Bluesbreakers seem to start around $600 these days. The Bluesbreaker is an amp-overdrive style pedal designed to reproduce the tone of the amplifier of the same name from the 1960s. The basic circuit was used as the basis for the King of Tone (which I have previously posted an entry on). Aion FX took a couple of cues from the King of Tone and also provided an option to incorporate functionality from the JHS Morning Glory V3 (which I didn't actually incorporate into my build). The documentation for the Cerulean implies that at some point a King of Tone version may be offered in the future as certain board components are left unpopulated.