Total Recall unity volume and biasing

[befey]

I build my Total Recall awhile ago and everything works basically, but I noticed when I was doing the biasing that there was no point where I can get both a strong signal and also eliminate all the distortion.

I left it and figured it was good enough. But as I've played with it some more, it's becoming more of a frustration.

If I have the level knob at unity gain and play lightly, everything is cool.

But if I hit the strings harder, I get a really ugly distortion on the first and every repeat.

I can turn the level down to a point where everything sounds nice and clean, but then I need to add makeup gain after the Total Recall to get everything back up to unity.

I'm guessing that I must have messed something non *critical* when I built it, since it does work aside from this annoyance. I vaguely remember using a non-polar for one of the caps instead of the polar called for. Is it possible that would do it?

Is there anything else I can check... maybe I pulled a wrong resistor or something? Can anyone point me to the most likely candidates to check?