Rodent problem (no, not an infestation)

[Bucksears]

I'm still working on a Rodent from the GGG site. (Almost) everything's populated and I'm running on a 9V battery. The problem is that it appears as though something is not biased right: the tone and volume controls work, but I get NO sound until I hit that 'sweet spot' on the gain pot. Even then, the sounds that come out are a little fizzy and they decay quickly.
I've tried resoldering the IC socket and will probably need to measure some voltages at the IC at this point.
I should say this: I'm missing the (5485) transistor for the Millenium Bypass. Should that make a difference or is the problem elsewhere?

Any ideas?
TIA

[Bucksears]

Ok. Got it working.    Turns out (after nearly a complete rebuild and checking over everything 10x with a multimeter) that it was a bad pot. I swapped out the 100k log with a 100k lin that I had lying around and it worked. I can't recommend enough that if you want a good sounding distortion that puts out some classic tones, give the Rodent a run.