sitting in their underwear in their dorm
rooms with a bag of Cheetos, copying my
mods and putting them up on eBay, start-
ing their own websites, or giving them away
for free. They’ll say, ‘Hey, this has got a
Keeley Mod,’ and people will purchase it,
thinking it does.”
Initially, he says, he was flattered by all
the impersonators. But after he was forced
to start laying people off due to lost busi-
ness, it lost its charm. He finally addressed
the situation. “I tried to encourage them
to come up with their own names and
brands,” he says. “I even offered to help
with designs and come up with new things
so they’d be less inclined to copy our stuff.”
He says that, for as many people as his
confrontation deterred, an equal number
are still out there. Maybe that’s just the
price one pays for being a front-runner.
“[Other builders] were trying to find old
carbon-comp resistors and old caps with 20
percent tolerance. Meanwhile, I was trying
to go for the 1 percent precision or the even
higher precision—maybe .01 tolerance.”
—Robert Keeley
Unique Designs
Though many would-be impostors might
be able to pull off some of Keeley’s mods,
most aren’t able to build effects from the
ground up like he does. When it comes to
his custom pedals, Keeley says he likes to
keep things simple, while also incorporat-
ing the most recent technology. His phi-
losophy today is to “create simple, straight-
forward things conceptually, but with hi-fi
or commercial-grade fittings to make them
better than the competitor.”
That translates to a product line that’s
compelling but not elaborate. “We don’t
have any wild and crazy digital delays or
fuzzes with 20 knobs on them,” he says.
Citing his very first unique design, the
Katana Boost, Keeley says he envisioned it
being unique but with a very simple func-
tion. Using a vintage doubler (a circuit
with an AC input and a DC output of
roughly twice the peak input voltage), he
created a pedal that many players love for
both the cleanness of its boost and its har-
monic richness.
The Fuzz Head—another favorite of
Keeley’s customers—is a simple blend of
vintage germanium-fuzz design with mod-
ern gain stages that he says allow it to excel
as a lead boost or to lay down thick, tube-
like tones. “It’s just a very basic circuit,”
he says, “coupled with stuff that I learned
from modifying Boss and Ibanez stuff.
At the time of its creation people, weren’t
commonly using buffers or differential
amplifiers with fuzz circuits.”
But of all his unique pedals, the Keeley
Compressor is by far the most popular.
He’s sold close to 27,000 since its incep-
tion in late 2001, and orders continue to
pour in. He attributes its popularity to the
quality of its components, which reduce
the level of unwanted noise—a common
artifact with high compression settings.
He also says when he was first designing
the pedal, none of his peers were using
the high-end parts that he was going after.
“They were trying to find old carbon-
comp resistors and old caps with 20 per-
cent tolerance,” he says. “Meanwhile, I was
trying to go for the 1 percent precision
or the even higher precision—maybe .01
tolerance—so the compressor did its job to
the best of its ability. Ours was better than
the competitors’, because we made those
efforts. [At that time] no one had taken a
simple design paired with hi-fi parts—it
just wasn’t common to use high-end parts
in the guitar-effects world.”
Given how popular quality compres-
sion is with country twangers, it’s notable
that even Paisley’s former tech was sur-
prised by the love-at-first-sound affair he
had with the Keeley Compressor. “Finally,
someone had made [a compressor] that
didn’t color the sound,” Weaver says. “My
tremolo pedal no longer had a level drop
when I stepped on it.”
These days, Keeley resents that, with
his company-running duties, he’s not able
to experiment with new designs as much
as he’d like—although he tries to reserve
every Friday for tinkering. “Months have
gone by where I don’t get to touch a cir-
cuit,” he says. “Every time it seems like I’m
going to be able to experiment a lot more
than one day a week, we undergo some
growth or another and it just doesn’t hap-
pen.” Just such a situation arose recently
when Keeley announced that Guitar
Center is now carrying his stompboxes—
but the amount of production needed to
fill orders took over his ability to experi-
ment. Instead, he has an engineer whom
he says he can vicariously experiment
through by making suggestions. “I don’t
have to have my hands on everything to
do the experimenting,” he says.
