Coming to us from the Croatian sensation Dawner Prince Effects is the Diktator Preamp/Overdrive/ Distortion. This pedal does a great job of driving your guitar into your amp. I would say that in a word this is a drive pedal because it can put your guitar through an evolution of drive stages all the way from warmth and presence with its preamp stage to tight and pretty heavy distortion with the pedal fully engaged and hot using it’s Detonator mode. The circuits are mounted in a cleverly designed green enclosure with two LEDs that report the signals intensity intentionally placed as the cartoon dictator’s eyes. (love it)
The Feature Set:
The pedal is broken down into two sections, Fuse and Detonator. The Fuse section is simply a preamp with a clean boost of up to 30 dB associated with the Boost knob. Turning this on with modest levels of Boost will still fatten up your signal. The Detonator section makes for most of the pedal as it has far more controls associated with it. You can use both modes in series to provide for boost and distortion combined to nice effect. The Detonator section features active Treble and Bass EQ circuits, which actually makes your adjustments quite sweet as opposed to a passive circuit. The adjustments always seem to have a major impact on the signal, which is nice. The Soft/Hard switch toggles between a rounder vintage tube distortion and a more modern high octane distortion. I really like both and they prove useful in their respective applications. The Dark/Bright switch toggles between dark and bright variations on the distortion channel’s tone and creates quite drastic changes. The Drive knob helps dial in just the right the right amount of distortion, while the Level knob allows you to adjust the overall volume level of the Detonator circuit.
All in all, in a sea of gain intensive boxes of joy, the Diktator holds its own. The quality components and beautiful active EQ, as well as the Soft/Hard and Dark/Bright switches make for a complete package of wonderful distortion and overdrive effects. Throw in a really awesome preamp and clean booster to boot and you’ve got one heck of a pedal. I continue to be impressed with this newer maker. And I love those LED eyes! –Gus Green
Check out this video we found on the internet:
