Another ROG May Queen question... mid control?

[Stompin Tom]

I put together RunOffGroove's May Queen booster last night.

http://www.runoffgroove.com/mayqueen.html

And had some issues... 

1) It's really noisey (white noise sort of stuff), but maybe a box will help with that.

2) I'm not getting a lot of gain/distortion... It doesn't sound much like the sound clips.  It's sort of mild with nice mid-range type harmonics...  nice, but not distorted.  I checked the voltages for the three places they suggested and found mine to be very similar (8.6 at the battery, 5.5 at the trimmer, 8.3 at Q1, and 1.6 at Q2).  I even tried a couple different Si trannies for each... all with the same result.  Anyone else had this problem?  Is it designed to push an overdriven amp?

3) So, for fun I drop this cheap Ge trannie in for Q1 and, presto, she really starts to sing.  very nice.  I don't really understand this, seems the biasing would be all wrong... but why question what works?  The Ge trannie really emphasizes the weird mid-range thing going on... it sounds kind of like a wah pedal left in a half up/down position (someone else commented on this in the archives).  So, I guess my question here is: can I some how adjust the midrange with a pot?  I don't claim to understand this circuit, but I imagine the J201 is what's clipping(?) or adding this characteristic to the sound?  To my ears it's sort of like Tim Escobedo's cinnabar (the mid clipping/timbre thing):

http://www.geocities.com/tpe123/folkurban/fuzz/snippets.html

So, I was wondering if I could just stick a pot in front of the J201, as Tim did...  or should I use the Boutique Fuzz Face (http://www.generalguitargadgets.com/diagrams/fuzzface_b_sc_pp.gif)  as my model and add a pot from the collector of Q1 (like the contour pot)?

I will experiment with this, but some initial guidance would be much appreciated. 

[alteredsounds]

I found it really quite high gain tbh, if not one of the highest gain pedals I've built.  Pretty high background noise from the level of gain but nothing that cant be sorted.  Nice sound though.

Cheers,
Nick,

[Stompin Tom]

no, mine's not very high gain.  I'll check over the circuit again when I get home, but I've done that a trillion times already.  Any ideas on what's going wrong there?  Some people have had this problem in the past (in the archives), but resolved it by fixing pinouts or changing trannies... I've already tried all that and no fix.  I guess I did something wrong... oh, but what?

[alteredsounds]

I'm sure its 100% the same circuit but I did mine from Torchy's layout.  I really cant see how it would make any difference but I thought I'd mention it.

Cheers,
Nick,

[Stompin Tom]

Actually, I used torchy's layout, too...