“It felt like hot-rodding cars to me”: Robert Keeley on his career switch from engineering professor to star pedal maker
Some stars of the gear world have made a name for themselves by discerning a gap in the market and driving hard into it. For Robert Keeley, however, it was a love of audio electronics luring him toward the thing he was called to do – and finding he belonged there all along.
For pedal maker Robert Keeley, it has always been about sound first. And isn’t that exactly how it should be? Chasing a love of electronics eventually brought him to where he stands now, as one of the world’s most successful and respected ‘boutique’ pedal makers, with 33 people (24 in production alone) working in his Edmond, Oklahoma, headquarters. Getting there, however, involved following a rather winding road.
Much of Keeley’s youth was spent in various locations around the country, and the world, while his father moved from post to post as a Captain in the US Air Force. For four influential years during his teens the family was at Remstein Airforce Base in Germany. Keeley’s obsessions grew – not only with the guitar, but once he got his hands on a Fostex four-track cassette recorder, he was soon hooked on mastering the art of studio engineering, recording and overdubbing. Once he had tasted the allure of building and modifying circuits for himself, though, the focus was inexorably drawn elsewhere.
While wending his way through a seemingly endless trough of engineering-related educational endeavours – a year-long course in computer building, four years of junior college in electronics, then four years earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University Of Oklahoma – Keeley just kept being drawn time and again back his own true siren’s call questions: how are these sounds made, and how can I make them better?
A spark of interest
Like a lot of young would-be whiz kids, Keeley’s first hands-on experience came from a simple electronics project. “The first spark of electronics in my world was making a flashlight in mid-1978 in Upper Michigan,” he tells Guitar.com. “I’d use old paper towel rolls to band together D cells. Getting the wires soldered between the batteries and light bulb was a never-ending struggle in burning my fingers and bad connections that developed by the minute, broken wires all of the time.”
That same year, a Yamaha student model acoustic guitar given to him by his grandmother would help stir another obsession into the pot, as would the virtuosic playing of Edward Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Even amid the practical educational undertakings to follow, however, it would take some time for Keeley to turn the focus to designing and creating the effects that would one day carry his name.
Between his junior college and university courses, Keeley took a job at a stereo store, largely installing and modifying car audio systems, and found it a more formative position than the title might imply. “Car stereos were amazing devices, with quad output systems, low voltage supplies, high current, switching designs. There was a ton to learn that would help with effect pedal development.” Applying that to a senior design project at the University Of Oklahoma, for which he created a digitally controlled analogue delay and tuner, finally brought him in from the cold. And the die was cast.
The business itself really came together when Keeley was working as an engineering professor at Vatterott College just outside Oklahoma City. One day he was teaching engineering systems, and seemingly the next he was hiring his own students to help build the pedals that had taken off from his side gig. “The first [Keeley Compressor] went out September 2001, and I had quit my job as a professor at the college in May of 2002.”
Hot-rod mentality
Part of what helped to get Keeley Electronics recognised early on was an enthusiasm for repairing and modifying popular existing pedals: a quick search will still turn up several Keeley-modded Ibanez Tube Screamers, Boss DS-1s, Vox wahs and a gazillion other pedals on the secondhand market. In 2014 the company ceased offering mods of old pedals from other makers in the wake of the rampant success of its own creations. But Keeley himself maintains a deep respect for the classics, married to a hot-rod shop’s enthusiasm for upgrading and supercharging existing platforms to take them into new and exciting territory.
“We’re essentially still doing the same thing [with our own pedals]”, he says. “Big Muffs, Rats, Tube Screamers, the DL4, the TC Electronic chorus and flange, the Boss DD-3 all are still amazing sounds and you can do a lot with the basic building blocks that hasn’t been done. I really want to combine sounds and effects and switching into something that makes music creation fun and easy. I like improvised music. So, as we develop new things, we are always modding our old stuff, making it better, more toneful, more dynamic, responsive, noise-free.”
To that end, and as much as he enjoys designing new creations, he freely admits that – as do most makers – he owes a certain debt of gratitude to the classic, the pedals that still lay the foundations for the vast majority of soundscapes out there.“You have to know the classics,” he asserts. “Not many people are like Z.Vex and Joel Korte of Chase Bliss. Most folks have to build from something inspirational.”
Part of what had drawn him to the market in the first place, though, was that drive to mod and hot-rod effects that was so prevalent in the late-90s and early-2000s boutique wave, when players and small-shop makers had already come to a solid re-appreciation of what the classics could do, and now wanted to push them to do something more.