The Keeley Compressor Plus has been on more professional pedalboards than most pedals ever get close to. With over 80,000 compressors built in the Keeley shop, compression is what they are “famous for” and genuinely what they do better than almost anyone else
The Compressor Plus is where that expertise lands for most players.
It was Reverb.com’s Best Overall Selling Pedal of 2021. Not a category win — overall best seller across every pedal type. That tells you something about how widely it’s trusted and how consistently it delivers.
It does what a compressor should: limits the peaks in your playing and adds sustain as notes fade.
What makes it more than a basic compressor is the Blend control, parallel compression, which keeps the natural transients and pick attack of your playing while the sustain and evening-out effect works behind it.
The Tone control recovers the highs that compression typically softens and loses, derived from vintage BBD delay circuits rather than a standard EQ design.
The Attack/Release switch specifically voices the release time for either single coil or humbucker pickups because humbuckers have more average energy and need a faster release to stay clear and defined.
Set it subtle and it makes your guitar sound like it’s been professionally recorded. Push it harder and you get the sustain and bloom that turns a good loop into a great one.
Controls:
Summary
- Sustain: Adjust compression ratio
- Tone: Gives a bit more brightness
- Blend: Mixes compressed and dry signal
- Humbucker / Single coil toggle (Attack / Release): Adjusts the attack and release curves of the compression for pickup type
- Level: Overall output level
Sustain
Adjusts compression ratio and increases sustain. Note: higher sustain settings will create noise when not playing.
Tone
The Tone Control is our own design taken from analog delays and other vintage effects.
Those effects used an emphasis circuit to recover treble and highs after they went through the BBD or other analog delay lines.
We took that circuit and made it into a fully fledged tone control! We have found that it is the perfect way to gently add back in those highs lost in the compression process.
Blend
Adjusts the mix of compressed and uncompressed signals. Full left for clean, full right for full compression.
The Compressor Plus now sports a Blend Control that retains the peaks in your playing and, more importantly, the proper phasing of your guitar signal.
The Keeley Compressor Plus offers the same gorgeous push of frequencies and sweetening of tone that the old comps gave you, now with the flexibility to easily handle any instrument.
The Blend Control is a way of getting the peaks to come through while having sustain at the same time. So if you want sustain more than peak-limiting, this style of Manhattan Compression is for you!
Keep all the peaks and transients with the Blend and Tone Controls while adding sustain on the back end. Heaven!
Attack / release
Adjusts the attack and release for single coils or humbuckers.
The new Release Switch on the Keeley Compressor Plus is designed to make it very easy to transition between single-coil and humbucker guitars.
Humbuckers have more average energy than single coils which can cause compressors to stay in “compression mode” for a lot longer. When this happens, any series of notes you play will sound dull.
With the quick release of the new Compressor Plus, your humbuckers remain true sounding, and each note retains dynamic attack and definition.
Level
Adjusts for gain lost to compression or blend. Set to unity or turn it up for a boost.
Adjusts the brightness of output. Turn right for a brighter tone.
Footswitch
Turns the effect on or off.
Watch The Compressor Plus In Action
Key Features
- Sustain, Tone, Blend, Level controls plus Attack/Release switch
- Blend control for parallel compression — retains pick attack alongside sustain
- Tone control derived from vintage BBD emphasis circuit — recovers highs lost in compression
- Attack/Release switch voiced for single coils or humbuckers
- True Bypass
- 100% analogue
- 9V DC centre-negative, 10mA — extremely light current drawBattery operation supported
- Made in the USA
FAQs
Sustain sets the compression ratio, so turn it up and the compressor works harder. Blend mixes your dry signal alongside the compressed signal.
It sets the release time of the compressor. This is importatant because humbuckers have more average energy than single coils. This can cause a compressor to stay in compression mode for longer than it should and makes the sound dull and undefined. So it aligns the pedal to the pickup type.
It’s not a standard tone control. It is based on those in vintage BBD analogue delay lines . It gently adds back highs that compression tends to soften. Turn it up for shimmer and clarity, leave it for a warmer, smoother sound.
Yes.
Yes. Just turn the Blend off to remove the compression, and use the Level control to push the signal.
9V DC centre-negative at only 10mA. It can also runs on a 9V battery.
Yes. The Blend control and the humbucker/single coil switch make it very flexible.
No more than any other! The manual notes that higher Sustain settings will create noise when not playing. This isn’t a design fault, just an inherent feature of high gain compression.
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