Noisy rat clone

[spargo]

I recently built a RAT clone based on the tonepad layout.  Two modifications I made were adding a potentiometer & cap BEFORE the clipping stage to adjust the frequencies, and installing an ON-OFF-ON switch to switch between clipping with LEDs, Ge diodes, or silicon diodes.

When the pedal is on with the gain cranked up, it's ridiculously noisy.  It's the typical noise you'd get from cranking an overdrive up.  It's not noticeable when you're playing, but almost seems to be on the verge of feeding back if you're not careful when you aren't playing.  I used low tolerance parts all throughout, film & silver mica caps.  I also used tantalums, but those wouldn't affect the noise THAT much would they?  The main thing I'm comparing this to is a bluesbreaker clone which is much quieter.  Even a stock SD-1 is way quieter than this.

I'm powering it with a PP2+.

[petemoore]

When the pedal is on with the gain cranked up, it's ridiculously noisy.  It's the typical noise you'd get from cranking an overdrive up.
  High gain distorter, hard to tell until the onion has been peeled and noise before/after is noticed as different.
  A loose ground will do this maybe too, check all grounds.
  What gets in the signal path is another matter, SC pickups or HB ? What is the noise like when the signal input is ground? [guitar volume ATW down].
  The other possible signal inputs include ground and power supply, or something outside the box.
  1,000's of components later, I've never heard a noisy good-one that worked right [ie not damaged/new always seems to work w/low noise].
  Electrolytics sometimes are polarized and tantalums are polarized. If reverse polarized they are considered damaged.

[oomnelson]

Moreover, the Rat is well known, it´s a noisy pedal.
Did you use tantalum in the tone section?... you can obtain a better performance using polyfilm caps, this caps are quite big, but it makes a real difference.