Monday, 23 January 2012

OKKO - Dominator

The OKKO Dominator is a super high gain distortion machine from Germany. I love those massive LEDs they have as a status indicator. They also sound pretty damn mean too! This thing is in the same ball park as the Wampler Triple Wreck - that gives you some idea of the amount of gain this thing has!

Here's a description from the OKKO website:

"After countless hours of tweaking and improving the circuit, I’m proud to present you the DOMINATOR high gain drive.Aggressive british crunch, classic heavy metal, brutal modern high gain stuff or anything in between – the Dominator will do the job.
This box has nothing in common with those overcompressed, artificial sounding "bedroom metal" distortion pedals that disappear in the mix if you try to use them in a real band situation. Raw natural gain structure, explosive attack, tight low end and great chord definition make the difference – the Dominator works equally well at home practice or stage level.

The active 3-band EQ with switchable mid range frequency provides effective and intuitive control over a broad range of sounds.

Just like the other OKKO drive pedals, the Dominator features an internal voltage doubler. The three gain stages and the EQ stage operate on different individually filtered voltages up to 18 volts for optimal dynamic response and very low noise performance.

The Dominator works best in front of a clean amp with some headroom, especially if you use very bass heavy "chugga chugga" settings."

And a demo video of the OKKO Dominator in action:


Here's an internal gut shot:


Here's the schematic drawn up by Saruman:


As you can see it's an opamp clipper running at a higher voltage than usual with the distortion coming from the clipping in those opamps! I'm not usually keen on opamp clipping but it does sound pretty good in the Dominator.

Anyway, heres's a vero layout by Harald Sabro (http://www.sabrotone.com):


And a PCB layout and associated files by Mundry: http://www.box.com/s/n7iekvtxtgjx6z1rbq3v

And the freestompboxes.org forum thread for reference: http://freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12031

1 comment:

  1. Great build, and many thanks for posting it. Took a while but finally working and rocking!. The transistors should be turned 180°. Alejandro from Argentina.

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