Guitarist, Sugarland
In 2005 I was out on the road with Sugarland. That year we were direct support for Brooks and Dunn, while Jack Ingram was opening the dates. Chris Masterson (Son Volt/ Steve Earl) was playing with Jack and he had some pretty sweet boutique pedals out with him. Many of which I had never heard of, including the Keeley 2 knob comp. I think he had an extra and agreed to sell me one. That pedal never left my board. First thing in the chain and I have kept that tradition alive with a 4 knob and now a comp pro. Robert has that original 2 knob somewhere on a shelf. I may want it back before all this is over, but meanwhile I continue to enjoy all of the Keeley pedals. I was a customer back in the mod days as well and I had Robert spruce up my TS-9 and Line 6 delay. I’ve seen the company grow by leaps and bounds since then and I couldn’t be happier or more proud of the work the whole Keeley team does.
This year we wrapped things up with a symphony tour of Christmas music. Symphonies aren’t ever happy about loud amps so I switched over to a Kemper, which I was pleasantly surprised by. It really did the job and saved a lot of volume grief. That said, I kept a few analog pedals on the board, including a trusty 4 knob and the Red Dirt, Geranium. The idea was that I had an amp at the ready incase something fizzled out, but I ended up using the pedals on the front end of the Kemper. Sounded great and maybe even helped to warm things up further with the profiler.