BMP/Swollen Pickle Questions

[dumbmonkey]

Hey there,
A friend of mine gave me a Behringer Vintage Distortion pedal and I thought it would be cool to build a "Swollen Pickle" style BMP in the enclosure.  I used Steve Cerutti's schematic as as a reference (http://www.aronnelson.com/gallery/main.php/v/SteveC/pickle2.jpg.html), which, by the way has a couple of 1uf caps oriented incorrectly.  Used electros where indicated, 2N5089s for the transistors. Laid it out in Eagle for anyone interested in taking a look.  Anyhow, I've perfed it up and I have sound but it seems unusually quiet compared to the bypassed sound.  I would think that it would be really loud and over the top.  Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome as are anyones pin voltages for the transistors so I can debug before going back to the drawing board. 

[compuwade]

Of course it's hard to tell what is the exact problem, but I had the same problem with the Rat I built and I found after looking closer that i had soldered a couple of resistors together on the output buffer. That's probably the same type of thing you've done. Check your soldering and if all else fails replace the last transistor. Thats what I would do anyway.

-Wade

[BRingoC]

the swollen pickle is exactly the same schematic as the BMP, except in the tone section.  If you reference another schem of the BMP and copy the tone section of the pickle schem, then you will have the right pedal.  To make it more complicated, it's possible to build both circuits on the same pedal by using a DPDT pedal, a dual ganged tone pot, and flying the tone components from the pot.

[compuwade]

Check your connections to the last stage after the tone pot. I believe there is a problem in the connections to pins 1,2, or 3 of the IC. There is most likley a resistor either not connected or two connected together that is causing the issue.

[dumbmonkey]

Thanks for the help! I was wondering about that last stage, the pin voltages on the last transistor were crazy high compared to the others.