Set the gain around noon and the Dover gets all creamy and smooth, with all the characteristics of David’s On an Island tones. At lower gain settings, you’re in the JTM45 territory and paired with a humbucker guitar, the Dover nails everything from Just Got Paid to Back in Black.

You could use it as a booster but the huge amounts of mid range, makes it a tad too dark and not as clean as a scooped booster. Alone, the Dover Drive lack the fat low end (not as badly as the Tube Screamer though), but in a band setup, that low end will drown behind the bass drum and bass guitar, which again makes your guitar difficult to hear.

Amps, pickups and pedals with a good amount of mid range, will effortlessly cut through the dense mix and sit right beside the vocals. The typically scooped pedals, like your transparent boosters and Big Muffs, sound great alone, when you’re jamming in your bedroom, but in a band or recording situation, your guitar will, in most cases, drown behind the drums and keys. You may dismiss it as too boxy and thin at first but it’s important to understand why mid range is so important to your guitar tones. And make no mistake the Dover Drive has A LOT of mid range. This completely changes the character of the pedal, from sounding bright and boomy, like David’s tones, to dark and smooth, with more emphasis on the mid range. He’s always set the Hi and Lo (treble and bass) very low. And it sounds awesome!Īs the name implies, the Dover Drive is perhaps more oriented around Eric Johnson’s way of using the Tube Driver. This is not a clone or solid state pedal board friendly version of the Tube Driver. Is this really a Tube-Driver-Gilmour-in-a-box? The answer is no. Inside the pedal, there’s also a bias trim pot, allowing you to fine tune the gain stage. The Dover Drive is housed in a MXR-sized’ish chassis, with true bypass switching and it runs on 9V battery or Boss-style power adapter. Using the familiar graphics known from the overdrive pedal that’s as synonymous with Gilmour as the Big Muff, is risky business. Like many of you, I’m sure, I though “a Tube Driver clone? Do they dare? And without a tube?” Well, they asked for it.

Here’s my review of the Hermida Audio Dover Drive from Lovepedal.

Every once in a while a pedal pops up with a special appeal to us Gilmour nerds and with obvious references to a legendary overdrive pedal, I had to check out this one.

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