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Sorry, turned out to be an electrical outlet problem. The circuit is fine. More than fine, actually. I'm really liking what I'm hearing so far. Without going into over-the-top compression, I am able to dial it in to tidy up my guitar's clean sound. Sounds great for jangly strumming. Going the other way, with the sustain and drive turned up a little, I can get a tasty lead tone that isn't overly overdriven but has smooth sustain.

I'll reiterate that anyone looking to build this should pay attention to value of the Level pot. The original version uses a 100k pot but a 10k pot (as it's shown on the ver 5 circuit board) is probably the better choice.

I've finished building the White Horse and everything seems to work for the most part. However, there's a loud hum that's most noticeable when my hand is off of the guitar strings. The hum disappears when I bypass the circuit. I've checked over the circuit board but I haven't found any noticeable problems with solder joints. One thing I did notice was that I'd used a 100k pot for the Level control which appeared to give the output far too much gain. Ver 5 of this circuit uses a 10k Level pot so I simply soldered a 10k resistor in parallel to the 100k pot, reducing the pot's maximum resistance to around 10k and lowering the total gain. However, this did not seem to help with the hum.

I was wondering what the rationale was for changing the White Horse's ver 4 BS170 mosfet clipping to ver 5's 1n914 diodes. From the demo videos I've watched, I thought the mosfet clipping sounded pretty good. How do the diodes compare, sound-wise, to the BS170s?

I just finished a Mysterioso build and I'm liking what I'm hearing so far. I noticed for the linear-tapered gain pots, the distortion suddenly jumps towards the end of the pot's sweep, making it somewhat challenging to dial in the distortion to taste. Would the gain pots benefit from being log (audio) tapered? What about the volume pots?

I've always wondered why the Blackstone pedal uses trimpot-type controls instead of more standard pots and knobs. It seems to me that this would make the Blackstone less tweakable on the fly. However, assuming the Blackstone uses linear pots like the Mysterioso, I wonder if the designer thought it best to make the Blackstone more of a set-and-forget type of pedal. Basically, find the sound you like and leave it like that.