Robert Keeley wants to solve your sonic
problems. His business is only 10 years
old, but in the guitar-pedal universe he’s
known as a guru at taking the most beloved
effects and making them even better. He
says it’s all the result of a serendipitous
accident—a conversation he had with his
wife one day when he was desperately trying
to get his hands on a Ross Compressor.
His inner voice of reason spoke loud and
clear: “Didn’t you just get a degree for
building those things so you wouldn’t have
to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars
on vintage ones?”
It was early 2001, and Keeley had recently
earned his electrical-engineering degree from
Oklahoma University. He had been hoping
to break into the amp-building industry—an
industry that was already highly saturated
and becoming more so every day—but
instead he was teaching. He enjoyed it, but
not nearly as much as his music obsession.
“Sure enough, I did find the schematic
and the parts for the [Ross] pedal, and I
took off and built one,” Keeley says with
childlike enthusiasm. “When I heard it, it
was magical—I was completely stunned.”
In fact, hearing his own handiwork generated
enough personal excitement and fervor
to convince Keeley to ditch his teaching
career and start Keeley Electronics. At
that point, few people were doing modifications
and independent effects, so the lack
of competition was reassuring.
“I had been wanting to get into the
business one way or another, and it just so
happened that guitar effects came together
really nicely,” he says. “At the time, it was
just me, Analog Man [Mike “Analog Man”
Piera from Analog Man effects], and Mike
Fuller [from Fulltone]—I had no competition.
There was just nobody out there.”
Keeley says meticulous attention to detail
and a strong focus on customer service
were the foundation of his business.
He sold a handful of units, and then a
few dozen. He couldn’t believe how swiftly
his name spread throughout the industry. Soon
he had sold hundreds. He says his customers
were so thrilled with the sound of his effects
that, in almost no time, they’d made their way
into the hands of some very influential
players in Nashville and California.
Brad Paisley’s former guitar tech,
Chad Weaver, attests to the rapidity of
Keeley’s success. Curious as to whether
he’d like the sound of true-bypass,
Weaver ordered a Keeley Blues Driver
mod (a modified Boss BD-2 Blues
Driver overdrive). Imagine his surprise
when he excitedly tore open the package
to find an Ibanez Tube Screamer inside.
“It was an honest mistake,” he says.
“When I called Robert to let him know
I’d gotten the wrong pedal, he said two
boxes were mixed up in shipping, and
he would immediately send the correct
one.” Keeley also told Weaver that the
Tube Screamer would be a gift for the
inconvenience. “That alone told me a lot
about the man, but it wasn’t until I met
him that I realized how truly passionate
he is about his work,” says Weaver.
“At one point,” Weaver explains, “I had
only read about Robert Keeley and his
products, but after actually hearing them I
found so many other reasons to use them.
Here was someone who was taking the
effects I liked and improving upon them.
My beloved Tube Screamer had more clarity,
more bottom—and it even got a little
dirtier than the stock one. It became my
go-to overdrive pedal,” he says.
Mod Talk
The range of modifications that Keeley
eventually came up with was born of a
simple process: He identified common
complaints about popular pedals and
then set out to correct them. He found
that websites such as Harmony Central
were great for this, as the millions of
guitar players who post reviews on the
internet weren’t shy about voicing their
grievances. “I’d just get online and literally
tally up the complaints and fix
those little problems,” he says. “So our
[Ibanez] TS9 mods or BD-2s are products
of me simply listing out the cons
and then putting tick marks in each column.
One mark for bad phasers, etc., and
that gave me the exact road map to then
develop all of our mods.”
Keeley’s TS9 mod—one of his most
popular—has been used by Peter Frampton,
Jon Herington of Steely Dan, and former
Frank Zappa sideman Ike Willis, to name a
few. He starts by first changing the circuit
to a Texas Instruments RC4558P. Then he
changes the output resistors to metal-film
ones rather than carbon-comp resistors,
which add unwanted noise. This results in
better bass response, a greater range of overdrive,
and the ability to achieve a cleaner
sound by turning down.
His process for developing mods naturally
led him to working on kits for big-name
brands. To this day, he simply watches
what’s selling unless a player commissions
him for a specific project. “There weren’t
many people doing modifications to a variety
of popular Boss and Ibanez pedals—at
least not doing them
en masse,” Keeley says.
“I essentially became a dealer for Boss and
Ibanez, so I could get them at a good price.
Then I quickly got them to people like
Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and John Mayer—
when he was still a little kid—and all the
country guys, too. Like Brad Paisley. I heard
their complaints and solved the problems
they were having with the units.”
A few days before being interviewed for
this article, Keeley was working on a mod
of the popular MXR Phase 90 for Steely
Dan’s Donald Fagen. He laughs, because he
was copying a design from 1974, but technology
has come so far since. “The technology
these days is just really incredible,”
he says. “The projects I did in college that
were guitar-related were all based on stuff
that hadn’t changed since the ’80s, so I had
to use microprocessors to control ancient
technologies. There was nothing really new
to experiment with. People who were making
ICs were keeping them to themselves.”
He admits that, due to these technological
advances, building and modifying effects
has become much easier than he imagined
it would be when he was in school. On one
hand, this reality makes his job easier, but
on the other it was also enough to spawn
an entire industry of copycats.
Adjusting to the Competition
Somewhere tucked away in Keeley’s closet
is a T-shirt that reads, “Keeley, the House of
Blue Lights.” It was a gift from a customer,
referencing the blue LEDs that had become
his trademark. At the time, no effects
manufacturer was using blue LEDs—which
is part of the reason he chose to do so in
the first place. Today, blue LEDs are more
common than he’d like. Keeley says he
went from having almost no competitors
to hundreds—people who apply his concepts
and even his name to mods they hock
online. He warns unsuspecting eBay users
to beware. “College students,” he says, “are
sitting in their underwear in their dorm
rooms with a bag of Cheetos, copying my
mods and putting them up on eBay, starting
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 business,
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.
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 incorporating
the most recent technology. His philosophy
today is to “create simple, straightforward
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 function.
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 harmonic
richness.
Left to right: The Keeley 4-Knob Compressor has sold more than 27,000 units since 2001. The Fuzz Head is a germanium fuzz with modern gain
stages. And the Luna Overdrive features an ultra-flexible EQ section.
The Fuzz Head—another favorite of
Keeley’s customers—is a simple blend of
vintage germanium-fuzz design with modern
gain stages that he says allow it to excel
as a lead boost or to lay down thick, tubelike
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 inception
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 percent
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 compression
is with country twangers, it’s notable
that even Paisley’s former tech was surprised
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 circuit,”
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 happen.”
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 experiment.
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.
In addition to being excited about the
new deal with Guitar Center, Keeley is also
stoked about the newest addition to his
custom line, the Luna Overdrive, which
he began developing in 2008. According
to Keeley, it’s different from anything else
on the market—the fruition of his desire
to combine an overdrive pedal with a
hi-fi EQ. It took three years to get off the
ground, but in March of this year the Luna
became available to the public. Like all of
his designs, it’s completely handmade, and
his website boasts that the Luna is capable
of operating as a smooth, subtle drive that
provides plenty of warmth but can also
achieve a grittier sound with two different
drive stages and highly responsive Hi and
Lo tone controls.
Though Keeley is thrilled by every new
product he adds to his line, he says the
future of his company lies in perfecting
what he considers to be the staples of the
guitar effects world. Despite the living he’s
made based largely on modding Boss and
Ibanez pedals, Keeley says he views his
company as being more like Fender than
Boss or Ibanez. “I want to stick to the
basic tools that the guitar player needs,” he
explains. “Fender doesn’t have new models
and new shapes and designs every year.
They have the same one or different variations
on a theme, and that’s where I see
myself in the future. I think I would like to
stick with the basics like the preamp, the
compressor, and the simpler concepts—and
just do those really, really well.”