Lovepedal - Black Magic Distortion

Here's the Lovepedal Black Magic (the photo shows a pedal board with the Black Magic in the top right corner). There is only sparse information on these around on the internet but from what I've managed to cobble together it was a pretty old design that was an attempt to get some Eddie Van Halen "Brown Sound" tones. Greg over at freestompboxes.org picked one up and duly traced it out. Here's the schematic:

As you can see it's a very simple 386 based distortion, some people reckon it's based on Aron Nelson's "Smash Drive" circuit:

To be honest the circuit is so simple it's hard to tell if it is or isn't. Personally I don't like the sound of this thing, the distortion is crackly and the decay is gated and unmusical - I can see why Sean took it out of production pretty quickly!

Here's a vero layout by mcaviel, it's unverified but a quick check suggests it's OK:

Here's the freestompboxes.org forum thread for reference: http://freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12735