Keeley Electronics loves to play mixologist to the world of guitar effects pedals, having got everyone pretty darn merry with their highly versatile DDR pedal which brought overdrive, delay and reverb under one enclosure.
The DDR’s design was really ingenious – which is to say it was simple. The pedal is divided in two, with the left “wet” footswitch activating the reverb or delay, and the right “drive” footswitch activating the – yep, you got it – the overdrive.
Keeley’s latest pedal, the DCR Drive Chorus Rotary pedal, follows a similar principal, housing one channel of modulation and another of drive.
The DCR’s drive is described by Keeley as “highly saturated, perfectly compressed tube-gain tone” and there are two modes you can use this with. One is full-range, allowing you to really horse it, while the other combines a “slight” shelf filter and low-pass filter which should work nicely for adding tube warmth and thickness to your tone – a little push and some life.
The drive channel feeds into a modulation section that blends into a choice of modulation effects: you can have chorus or flanger, or rotary speaker-swirl for those Hendrix vibes that are just the thing for entertaining a bunch of hippies on a long hot summer night.
The range of tones on offer is quite incredible. Whether you are looking for some chunky tube overdrive with a thick swirl of flanger for that Nancy Wilson, Barracuda vibe or you are of a mind to use the rotary speaker setting set in the “Les” mode for organ-like tone, there are all kinds of usable combinations.
The Keeley Electronics DCR Drive Chorus Rotary pedal is true by-pass, made in the USA, and retails for $179 (£149, €165 approx).
See Keeley Electronics for more information.
