Hello Gearheads! Welcome back to another fun exploration into the diverse and toneful depths of the gear world! Today, it’s my pleasure to showcase a wonderful and fairly new addition from the geniuses over at Keeley Electronics. For anyone who might not be a musician and happen to enjoy reading my wax poetic diversions or if you’ve been living under a rock… on mars… in a different universe… Robert Keeley along with a few other early pedal builders, absolutely MADE this industry out of the mire. Keeley Electronics are dutifully one of the original gangsters of the pedal boom and we ALL have a lot to show in forms of gratitude for the ground they’ve laid. Since the early days of modifying pedals as a necessity, turned small business and now ultimately a modern empire - Robert Keeley and his team are evolving in the most beautiful of ways and showing the gear world how to become bigger and remain true to the original core values that made them who they are.
The Keeley Rotary is Robert and his team’s homage to the rotating speaker, most notably the Leslie rotating cabinet used by history’s musical greats. Keeley shrinks the form, function and tone into a tight laser cut aluminum case that is incredibly easy to use and sounds fantastic. I personally have had love/hate and mostly hate relationship with rotating speaker simulations as they almost always sound and feel like unnatural, phased, one dimensional chorus units. That’s not the case at all with the Rotary… it’s very sweet and immediately musical.
With just 3 knobs and two foot switches the Keeley Rotary offers a pretty wide feature set to shape your tone, while keeping the impressive core tones close to home. The Rotary is not trying to emulate every rotating cabinet ever made. It’s made to sound fantastic and eliminate the need to endless options and feature overkill. Exactly my kind of pedal! Simple. Elegant. Musical….
I found the Keeley Rotary to sound best in my rig with the MID boost either flat (down) or slightly boosted (middle position). It’s a wonderful feature though as it’s a subtle yet effective way to manage the EQ without getting too far out in the “weeds” as it were. There’s a common ground with the way these new pedals are being designed from Keeley… they’re all in that “Goldilocks” zone that give the end user the ability to shift and tailor their tones but not end up in option anxiety or quickly create an abrasive or unnatural tone.
The Rotary’s BLEND and DRIVE were best set to about 2:00 for the BLEND and 10:00 for the DRIVE in my rig while I kept the SPEED knob (the big mission control style knob) at around 3:00 for a nice faster rotation. They SLOW-FAST button comes in clutch with it’s ramping ability between the slow and majestic chorused and almost flange-like tones to the faster Jazzer-esq warble. You can adjust the speed at which the ramping up and down happens but I opted to keep it set stock as it’s meant to replicate how a traditional Leslie would work in that way. That SLOW-FAST foot switch is the key to creating realistic rotary tones and using it within your playing and phrasing is so beautiful and addicting. I really delved into this feature during the solo section of the demo below, to give that ebb and flow and create a dimensional movement to the tone.
What more can I say about this pedal! It’s killer, it’s small enough to fit on any pedalboard and it sounds incredible! Trey Anastasio, the front-man to the seminal jam band Phish has replaced his real rotary cabinets with the Keeley Rotary. If that doesn’t tell you something… I’m not sure what will. Trey can use whatever he wants and has used the real cabinets forever. I’ll say it again… these Rotary pedals are a triumph of form, function and tone!
I’d like to share one last thought on these new Keeley releases. Robert has repeatedly mentioned that his team have met new heights with their DSP engineering and processing of not only the algorithms themselves but also how the audio is passed through the pedal. I can attest that there’s this sense of a more robust and sweetened tone as I hear my guitar pass through the pedal. I firstly found this with a ZOMA (Keeley’s answer to the Strymon Flint) that I purchased and what ultimately led me down the road to reaching out to Robert to feature the Rotary. It’s akin to how signal flow sounds richer when it’s running through vintage rack gear with it’s outdated but amazing sounding components. Notes sound bigger, more 3D and natural. It’s hard to describe but the sound feels so more alive and while the point of this Gearheads Feature is to showcase the tone of the effects… this point was very much worth making as the sonic improvement is very well received and I’m excited to see what else the Keeley team come up with considering these advancements!
In the video demo below, I used the Keeley Rotary on all the guitars including the bass guitar with the BRAKE feature to utilize the EQ and gain structure of the Rotary minus the speaker movement. As mentioned earlier, I took advantage of the SLOW-FAST ramping foot switch often during the guitar solo section to great use. For anyone looking for a rotating speaker or Leslie simulation, I highly recommend the Keeley Rotary. It’s fantastic and certainly worth a spin!
Thanks for checking this Gearheads Feature on the Keeley Rotary. If you’d like to learn more about Keeley Electronics please do check out these sites for more information.
https://www.facebook.com/KeeleyFX
https://www.instagram.com/keeleyelectronics/
Until next time Gearheads, please take a moment to Like, Subscribe & Share this Feature and I’ll see you all very soon!