When people do a product review of something they bought, they obviously have a bias. I’m very aware of that. But if you run a guitar site that sometimes talks about products, you have to write about what you buy (in addition to what you try.) When a guitar site has ads, you have conflict of interest – if you’re taking money from Fender for ads, are you really going to trash them in a review? No. So you should take all reviews with a grain of salt. Whatever the hell THAT means.
I bought a Keeley 4 knob compressor at Guitar Center, and after spending some time with it, I have to say that it’s almost perfect. I’ve owned the Boss Compressor/Sustainer before, and when I sold that pedal I didn’t feel bad… it kills your low end, and when you push it you hear artifacts. When I tried out the Keeley I also tried out the Boss again. The difference was night and day. Ignore YouTube video shootouts – if you hear these things side by side, there’s a big difference.
Asking someone to drop $200 on a pedal that doesn’t change your tone radically or provide some super cool delay or flange effect might seem like a stretch, but it’s not. I got mine used for around $160, anyway. 🙂 So what’s the big deal? Let me tell ya…
Noise
This pedal is q-u-i-e-t. Whisper quiet. Like my Wampler Plexidrive, this pedal is lovingly hand-crafted in the USA using only high quality components. The marketing drivel says this pedal is comparable to a rack mount compressor. It IS. It’s amazingly quiet, even at high compression settings.
Artifacts
There are none. Not unless you kill the knobs on purpose to get a clipped attack. Most cheap pedals will have some amount of swelling in the sound, or unnatural decay. Not this pedal. It’s smooth. Your guitar sounds like your guitar, only better.
Differentiation
The Keeley 4 Knob Compressor has four knobs. Hence the name, babe. They are sustain, level, attack, and clipping. The clipping knob is a neat feature that separates this pedal from the others – it’s not exactly an overdrive, but it can give you a more exaggerated attack on clean sounds and you can use it with the level knob to overdrive the pre-amp on your tube amp’s clean channel. Which I did, on my 20 watt Peavey tube head. And it sounded fantastic. This thing, matched up with a nice Fender amp that has both preamp and master volumes, would be a match made in heaven.
A compressor has a tough job – it has to be able to compress your signal without sounding like it’s doing so, and without any extra noise or artifacts. The Keeley 4 Knob Compressor does this very, very well.
So what don’t I like about it?
It’s a little detail, but it matters. In a dimly lit room, when you turn this pedal on, you can’t read the labels under each knob. One, they’re written in cursive, two, they’re a small font, three, they’re black text on medium gray background, and four, when the pedal is on the pedal indicator light is super, super, super bright. Amazingly bright. As a web designer by day, I can tell you that small font black on gray cursive is not a very readable format. In a bright room, no problem. Don’t get me wrong, this is a teeny tiny issue. I’ve already memorized the knobs so I don’t need to look at the labels. But if I were going to change one thing, it’d be that.
Overall, I rate this pedal A+. If you are going to bother buying a compressor, buy a good one and keep it forever. The Keeley 4 Knob Compressor makes a strong case for being the best on the market.
