Best Lovetone Big Cheese Clones: Delicious Cheesey Guitar Fuzz Pedals

The Lovetone Big Cheese is one of the funkiest and most distinctive distortion and fuzz pedals ever made. It was discontinued in the late 90s and fetches quite a high price on the used market. Luckily, faithful clones of this pedal exist like the JHS Cheese Ball and Dan Coggins' designed Field Marshal. Here we list the best pedals to consider when searching for Big Cheese alternatives.

A Delicious Slice of Big Cheese

What makes the Lovetone Big Cheese notable? Well, it was extremely well made. It has a high-quality PCB and the expert soldering that you’d expect from Lovetone. It’s also just crazy in all the right ways. After all, it is a bright orange and purple box that is cheesed theme. The knobs are labeled for controlling “Curds” and “Whey”. The ergonomics are due to the designers’ large foot size, so the pedal has plenty of real estate for the controls and doesn’t feel restricted.

But despite all those great attributes, when the novelty wears off the real reason this pedal is special is its sound. It’s nothing short of epic. The sounds it produces are legendary and fuzz heads revere it for its versatility. From glitchy sputtering fuzz to creamy sustain, this pedal can dial it in. It’s little wonder this is one of the quintessential sounds of the ‘90s.

Dan Coggins, designer of the Big Cheese, has said The Big Cheese was his..

attempt to make something as chaotic as the Fuzz Face because the Fuzz Face is a chaos pedal, isn’t it? But it’s very controllable off the guitar because of its low input impedance and I decided to make a mashup of a Big Muff and a Fuzz Face because the Big Muff was the iconic pedal of the ‘90s because of all the grunge bands… so I bought a Big Muff and thought it was uncontrollable and unusable, so I really wanted to make a fuzz pedal that had some bite and some character to it that would stand out and you could hear what was going on. It was a train-wreck of a prototype, but it sounded good.

Hear it in action on U2’s Discothèque, Pavement’s Cream of Gold, and Wilco’s live performances of At Least That's What You Said.

Brief Lovetone History

Lovetone is an English company that was cofounded by Dan Coggins and Vlad Naslas in 1995. The company manufactured guitar pedals from 1995 until 2001, and through 2007 intermittently. The company is noted for bringing both originality and fun to the guitar pedal market. That legacy of taking their work seriously while not themselves seriously still is praised from many boutique builders they influenced.

Asked about the unique aesthetics of Lovetone, Dan credits Vlad with the visual design of the pedals as well as originally coming up with the Lovetone company name.

After Lovetone, Dan went on to found Dinosaural and is now the Analogue Design Engineer at Thorpy FX, makers of the Field Marshal.

Other Lovetone Pedals

The Big Cheese was Lovetone’s most popular pedal and has been used by ton of notable artists including U2, Radiohead, Wilco, Pavement, and others. Lovetone also produced:

• The Doppelgänger
• The Meatball
• The Wobulator
• The Brown Source
• The Ring Stinger
• The Flanger With No Name
• The Cheese Source