help troubleshooting big muff style circuit

[bob, just bob]

After building a few byoc kits successfully, I tried my hand at designing a big muff like distortion:



This boosts my signal, but the clipping diodes aren't clipping anything.  When using the saturation control, the tone is clean until it is apparently all shunt to ground.  The tone controls don't have the impact I was hoping for either. 

The first set of clipping diodes (connected to the saturation control) are 1n914s.  The second set is a red LED against 2 1n914s.  The transistors are 2n5089s.  The first clipping section is connected to a 3PDT footswitch (w/led).  I forgot to draw it here, but there is a pulldown resistor on the first clipping section too (1 meg ohm).

I used my multi meter to check the continuity between the collector and the clipping diodes and then from the clipping diodes to ground, and that was all ok.

Using a 9v power supply, here are the voltages on the transistors:
Q1
c: 2.0v
b: 0.8v
e: 0.8v

Q2
c: 0.8v
b: 0.8v
e: 0.6v

Q3
c: 1.0v
b: 1.0v
e: 0.8v

Q4
c: 5.6v
b: 0.8v
e: 0.8v

These voltages seem wrong too (if nothing else, shouldn't the emitter be a diode drop lower than the base?).  Where should I go from here?

[GibsonGM]

Your emitter R's might be too high, try lowering them to 100 ohm for more gain.   That might straighten out your transistor operation. If in doubt, you could also move your 430K bias resistor to the collector rather than right to +9V; the swinging voltage at the collector may have something to do with the problem. Get the 1st stage right, and copy from there....using the recovery stage as a starting point, the last Q, in the original circuit is a good way to go, it has tons of gain!  ;o)

[bob, just bob]

Your emitter R's might be too high, try lowering them to 100 ohm for more gain.   That might straighten out your transistor operation. If in doubt, you could also move your 430K bias resistor to the collector rather than right to +9V; the swinging voltage at the collector may have something to do with the problem. Get the 1st stage right, and copy from there....using the recovery stage as a starting point, the last Q, in the original circuit is a good way to go, it has tons of gain!  ;o)

I've read a number of posts saying that if the gain is too high you may get strange oscillations and you may even get no sound at all.  This circuit can do both, so I assumed I had enough gain.  But I'll try these things.  Thanks.

[petemoore]

  First I'd try to figure out why only Q4's collector is 'reasonable.
  The other three transistors aren't biased.
  It sort of looks like some of the adjacent pins are connected [for instance Q2's C/B reads same voltage and Q1's B/E does too], I would test for desired non-continuity between any transistor pins.
  1k should be biasable and workable, you can always put another resistor across the 1k to increase gain, two resistors parallel will equal a smaller resistance value.