gchiaren's Music Gear Setup

I play mostly garage rock/blues rock/alternative. I happened to fall in love with this pedal at the NAMM show. Each year I attend I like to make a short list of 5 or so things that excite me and that I plan to possibly buy over that year. I was hanging out at the JHS booth and spent way too much of my time playing with this bright orange little box.

So this is based off the Lovetone Big Cheese, which admittedly I know very little about. Officially it's classified as a "fuzz/distortion" pedal, which I would completely agree with. What motivated me to buy it was... well, I can't get enough of dirt pedals. They're so easy to switch in and out, and you never know when you find one that just hits a sweet spot.

Not much to say about the build quality, it's JHS so ya know it's gonna be solid. The bright orange paint and simple graphic is pretty distinctive and will pop on the pedalboard.

The bread & butter of the Cheese Ball and the knob worth discussing is the mode selector switch which has settings OFF - 1 - 2 - 3. The OFF mode is supposedly the brightest and lowest gain mode, but I quite like it. The pedal sounds very open and jangly in that mode, the gain knob is nice and responsive and the tone knob is disabled. This is probably more the Cheese Ball's distortion side, wouldn't quite call it fuzz yet.

Setting 1 is totally different. It's very mid-scooped. Not in a metal tone kinda way... more like a 90s grunge/alt-rock sort of vibe. In fact I love it for that. I almost consider mode 1 to be like a bonus pedal within a pedal. The mid scooped sound is not as unwieldy, and thus plays well with other pedals, like overdrive.

Setting 2 I probably use the least, just because it's neither here nor there. From setting 1, it adds more gain and more mids. This is the point where it starts to sound more like a fuzz pedal.

Setting 3 is a beast, and we've landed in fuzz territory. In fact, if you turn up the gain knob it gates the sound, kinda like your speaker is on the verge of dying. Very velcro, as they say. All in all I would say you need to experience this pedal in OFF and setting 3, with setting 1 being suited to a very specific style of rock.

I was a little hesitant that played through my setup the Cheese Ball would disappoint me considering I initially played it at an exciting music gear trade show, but all fear was put to rest when I heard it ripping through my Blues Junior. I have a Gibson ES-325 I adore with Gibson mini-humbucking pickups that pair really nicely with the Cheese Ball (the cheese puns are unstoppable). In an ocean full of drive pedals vying for my attention, the JHS Cheese Ball is unique enough where I can confidently say I'll have it for a while