Any Fender Blender experts out there?

[bsoncini]

My friend asked me to build him a fender blender.  Which I did from a verified vero layout on the tagboards site.  The pedal works as it should.  Getting a nice stong octave except there is a really weird crackling background noise that is always there but really noticable as the notes decay and become less strong.  When not strumming the noise is not there. I even put jumpers across the diodes that create the octave and with just fuzz it is still there.

I am not using the original transistors but have tried transistors of varying hfe from 2n3904 to 2n5088 to 2n5089 to mpsa18. I have also tried putting low gain trannys at the begining and high gain at the end and vice versa and the problem is the same.   I have tried numerous different diodes, both rectifying ones and clipping ones and it is the same.  LEDs as clippers tame it just slightly.

My friend basically wants it to just make a ton of noise so he might not mind but a few beers deep its peaked my curiosity for future learning and I'm really trying to figure this out now.

Here is the schematic  http://fuzzcentral.ssguitar.com/blender.php

Any help would be greatly appreciated.