EF440 too abrupt, OC replaced with LED and 2 LDR's

[juan_felt]

Hi, I just finished building an EF440 clone, following the GGG instructions. The only problem that I had is that here in Argentina is almost impossible to find the optocoupler, so I tried with an LED and two LDR's instead. I don't really understand how the OC works, so I don't really know if what I did was OK. Basically I soldered together two ends of the ldr's and soldered that terminal to where the middle end of the OC is meant to go, the other ends at both sides.

The effect works, I get filtered signal, but it's very distorted (I read that the EF440 itself is quite fuzzy), that could be fine with me, but the problem is when the level pot is all the way down, the effect is way to abrupt when decaying. The LED just goes from little light to none immediatly. Im using a clear blue LED.

Any ideas of how could I solve this? Thank you very much!!!!