A while back I bought a new Ibanez TS9 reissue pedal, but I ended up not liking it that much - it was OK with my humbucker Les Paul guitar (which had a lot of low and high end), but it didn't do much with my Telecaster or Les Paul Jr (which are already mid-heavy). The pedal also didn't go so well with my tube amps, and after selling the Les Paul with humbuckers, I had no place for the TS9 pedal.

That is, until a week or so ago, when, lucky for me, a potential buyer tried the pedal out, didn't like it, and said if he'd ever buy one he'd have it modified Keeley-style. And then it hit me: I know how to solder, I know what a capacitor is, what a resistor is, and so on! So I got all the information I could from the Internet (I live in Romania so sending the pedal over to Keeley is really not an option, it would more than double the price of the pedal in shipping and customs taxes alone), and what I did was:

1. changed the 0.047uF cap to 0.1uF for more low-end.
2. swapped the JRC4558D IC I had in the pedal for a TI RC4558P.
3. replaced a couple of 1uF electrolytic capacitors to WIMA metal film.
4. replaced the 0.22uF tantalum capacitors to WIMA metal film (I'll change the one in the tone section to 0.18uF later).
5. changed the 4k7 resistor to 2k4 and the 51k to 20k (Keeley's "more/less" distortion).
6. the TS9 to TS808 mod: changed the 470 resistor to 100 and the 100k to 10k in the output section.

The pedal is very different, it's great-sounding and needless to say it's off the market now.

Now, my questions are:

1. especially when I turn the DRIVE knob almost all the way up I get pretty audible noise. It's not so bad that it doesn't get drowned in the actual playing once that starts (kind of like the 60-cycle hum of single coils - or 50-cycle hum, like we have in Europe). I've seen suggestions on the net that I should swap the input transistor (2sc1815) to a MPSA18. However, from the data sheets I found on the Internet, the 2sc1815 is "E C B", and the MPSA18 is "E B C". Should I just try to bend the legs on the MPSA18 until I can reposition "B" and "C" in each other's place?

2. which one is the input transistor exactly? I can solder and pick up a capacitor, but I'm not really competent enough to know just by looking at the board, if there's more than one component with the same specs on it. I'm assuming that the input transistor is the one in the upper-left corner of the board, near the IC:



Is that correct?

3. I managed to find a picture of a Keeley-modified TS808 on the Internet, and it looks like he also changed the 0.02 input capacitor to something else (I can tell because there's a red non-polarized film-type capacitor there instead of the original see-through plastic greenish-ones that you can still see a couple of in the picture). I'm talking about the cap in the lower-left side of the picture, under the IC chip. Now, I didn't change that cap, and Keeley doesn't mention anything about changing that cap in the promotional talk about the TS808 Mod Plus on his website. So what value is that cap, and why was it changed?



4. Also in that picture, you can see that he changed 5 resistors to the metal-film type. I've only changed 4 of them: 2 for the more/less mod, and 2 for the TS9 to TS808 mod. The blue one in the low-center area of the picture, I have no clue why he changed that, and to what value. On my board, that seems to be an 8k2 resistor (if I've computed the value right by the color code). What's that resistor for, and why would it be interesting to swap it for some other value?

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for your replies!