The pc board works!
A few notes:
When mounting the pots, their bottoms need to be insulated from the board (they mount on the solder side). Some 1/16” rubber feet will work, or 1” squares of cardboard. You can stick/glue them to the bottom of the pot or to the board. Cut out the back of a notepad into 1” squares, and stick them onto the pots before you mount. Make sure your leads are cut short, as you don’t want anything poking through the cardboard/rubber and shorting to the pot.
Noisegait could be a 10k, as it’s written on the board, but builders often use a 1k. Either will work: 10k will give more sounds, but most of the cool stuff is in the 1k range.
Four pads need to be drilled out on the component side. This will already be done if you ordered a kit or a pcb from 4ms Pedals All are on the “ground plane”, the shiny square around the 7809:
Take a 1/8” bit and lightly drill off the silver pad on the component side. Don’t go all the way through, or else you’ll take off the pad on the solder side. Now when you insert the components you can just solder on the solder side. Make sure no copper is sticking out into the hole, or else the ground plane will short out the to component. Use a multimeter to test each hole, making sure there’s no continuity between it and ground.
Or you can take a dremel with a cutting wheel, and cut out a box around each of the 4 holes. This seems to be easier and quicker. Again, use a multimeter to test your cuts.
The reason this needs to be done is that the mask on the ground plane for some reason came right up to the pads, when the pads should have a little ring of blank space around them. This caused the pads to short out to the ground plane. So by removing the component side pad, the traces are no longer shorting out to each other.
It might be better to mount the 7809 and it’s 100uF directly on the powerjack. Seems to make it less howl-ly. Also putting a 100uF on the powerjack directly (before the regulator) helps if you’re having the problem of constant screaming.