My Distortion Pedal Doesn't Palm Mute @ High Gain

[kdog]

Built a Runoff Groove 3 legged Dog this week. It's a cool/easy build and really like the sound overall... I AM having one bit of funkiness with it that I'm wondering about. When I go much over half on the gain control, palm muted notes go to crap. Almost sounds like a noise gate kicking in too early. They come through but are really muffled. Long sustained notes sound fine at this setting. An initial sanity check on most connections look good with the meter and it sounds great in the "sweet spot".

I was wondering if anyone has any likely ideas for really obvious causes for this type of problem or quick fixes... Like I said it sounds really good in a certain range and I'm tempted just to live with it but if someone knows a trick or has an idea to help me get it working all the way out to the edge of operation that would be cool. The pedal volume almost completely goes to 0 with the gain at minimum too, BTW, which may be a telling sign as to what's gone wrong...

Thanks for any ideas...

[aron]

Some of the stages could be going into the equivalent of "blocking distortion". Just too much level to a stage. Or the stage is simply misbiased. Just a guess.

http://aikenamps.com/BlockingDistortion.html

[kdog]

Some of the stages could be going into the equivalent of "blocking distortion". Just too much level to a stage. Or the stage is simply misbiased. Just a guess.

http://aikenamps.com/BlockingDistortion.html

Thanks for the URL... I'd suspected something along these lines, and this does sound like what may be happening. It does have an awful lot of gain! The overall output level is huge too.

Thanks!

[Samuel]

FWIW I got the same thing with my Rat clone - and I was relieved to find this happens with an actual Rat as well... I just padded out some signal from the input and it went a long way to fixing it.

[aron]

BTW: Build an audio probe and you can hear it yourself. Go from stage to stage and listen to when it actually happens.