Maxon OD-820 Clone: Aion Electronics “Nimbus”

Pictured here is my newest completed pedal project.  It’s the Aion Electronics Nimbus Overdrive.  Recently I had built myself a Klon clone and found it useful enough to include in my rig. If you didn’t know, the Klon is kind of known for it’s prominent mid-hump EQ. At first, I wasn’t really too crazy about this, but ultimately I decided that the contrasting nature of the Klon to my other OD tones was a good thing and this secured it a space on my board.

While browsing the Aion Electronics shop, I came across the Nimbus. The one thing I really like about this site is that if a pedal has any interesting history/controversy at all, it will be clearly written about. Well, apparently, the Maxon OD-820 had some, and it had to do with the Klon. 

I was intrigued when I realized that comparisons were often made between the OD-820 and the Klon. And from a handful of descriptions and sound demos I started to think that the Maxon might’ve been more my cup of tea. So I bought the board, sourced the parts, and like all my projects, I tried my best to make it beautiful.

Here’s another shot of it on my board, taking the place of the Klon. I managed to get that LED to glow fairly bright, but soft at the same time (reminds me of Ironman’s arc reactor). So far, I’ve only had a chance to play with it at bedroom levels, but I can already hear the similarities and differences. But where it differs from the Klon is really what I care most about. The tone knob was much more flexible and didn’t possess that same mid-range hump. The overall character and range of the overdriven sound is similar. Interestingly, it seems to stack better with my boost than the Klone. With the Klone, there were certain points on the gain knob that I had to stay away from, or else the boost would cause it to be overly compressed or have this sputtering characteristic. I seem to not have this problem with the OD-820 clone.

So far I’m really happy with it. That’s not to say that I’m about to retire the Klone any time soon. But I definitely think I’ll be playing with this one for a good chunk of time. But to be 100% honest, I’m already eyeing Azimuth overdrive that’s on Aion’s site. Looks like a fairly simple build that’s supposed to be reminiscent of this legendary Dumble amp that know close to nothing about!

here’s an image of the guts.