The King of Tone is a Marshall Blues Breaker with a few changes. I haven’t built the Paragon but have built a few different Blues Breaker based pedals with both soft and hard clipping diodes. One thing they all have in common is when in a clean boost mode they get loud, when you switch any type of clipping on the volume drop is considerable and you have to crank the volume up to compensate for it. If using germanium diodes, the drop is much more noticeable. This is the nature of the circuit. So crank the volume and enjoy it is a great sounding circuit, it just need a little more gain on it.