Germanium Silicon emulation

[balno]

Hello there,

I'm currently studying the "Piggyback" NPN Silicon Fuzz Face - Germanium Emulation as described here :  

http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.com/2012/06/npn-silicon-fuzz-face-germanium.html

I ended with this schematic :

As far as I know, the base-emitter junction of a transistor acts like a diode. Do you think it will work if I use a diode in place of Q2 ? Or do transistors have magic properties I will miss ?

Thanks for extending my knowledge, as usual...

[induction]

R.G. says no dice:

R.G. wrote

What a bipolar transistor base-emitter junction does that a diode junction does not is to have an equivalent nonlinear resistor arising from the transistor action.