Slightly beginner questions

[icurays1]

Hello, everyone.  I'm new, of course, but I'll try my best to not be annoying.  I've been interested in guitar electronics for quite a while but just started doing stompboxes a few days ago.  I started with this circuit:
http://www.diystompboxes.com/pedals/gusOverdrive.gif

After getting all the parts and looking over the build tutorials for the beg. project on the forum, I went at it and soldered it up in a few hours.  I guessed on about 5 things (transistor direction, grounding, a few other things..) and just figured i'd have a learning experience.  but this morning, I plugged it in, and it works perfectly!  I was happy.

Now heres my stupid newbie questions, and feel free to direct me to a previous thread or article or whatnot.  

  - How do I increase the amount of drive in the circuit?  There were not pots in the circuit, you just plug it in and turn it on.  the amount of overdrive is noticable, but i'd like a little more.  
  - In that same regard, how/where would i put a drive pot?  I've got about a dozen pots lying around from salvaged junk.  
  - I connected all the points that have the arrow and the '0' on the schematic to the negative terminal of the battery.  I knew they were all ground points, but was the - battery terminal the right place to connect all of them?  i also connected the input/output sleeves to the neg. battery terminal.   It seems to have no grounding issues, it's totally silent.

  Thanks everyone (Aron espically) for setting up this great website & forum.  I look forward to learning tons from everyone!

 Nick

[ninoman123]

You could try using a 2n5088 or 2n5089 transistors

[icurays1]

I probably should have wired in a transistor socket instead so i could swap out different ones.  Will every transistor have a different sound?  How does a Pot change the drive or tone on boxes if a pot is just a variable resistor?
 Thanks!

[ESPguitar]

Use a transistor with more or less gain (hfe)..

Usually they will sound different, if you test a bunch of different tarnsistors in the circuit you will hopefully learn about each of them and about what they do to the circuit.. Many won't work at all..

RB