Keeley Compressor Plus Germanium

25 years after Robert Keeley built his first compressor, Keeley Electronics returns to where it all began. The Compressor Plus Germanium takes the familiar foundation of the original and adds a carefully selected germanium stage to the circuit, bringing a warmer, more responsive character to a compressor that has already become a modern classic.

A germanium transistor can be wired to amplify, and plenty of pedals use it exactly that way, but here it works as a buffer and a tone-shaping stage instead. Germanium was chosen for its uniquely musical qualities: it takes the edge off high frequencies and distorted signals, lets notes sustain and bloom with an even, more touch-sensitive response, and saturates in a way that stays warm instead of brittle. All of it arrives without the noise or the lost headroom that normally come attached to a germanium circuit, which is why this pedal can sit on a board next to anything.

The four controls are the ones players have trusted for years, and they still cover everything from invisible glue to full squash. Level balances the output, and since compression always takes something away, it's also where you reclaim the gain you lost or push the pedal into a boost. Blend sets the mix of compressed and uncompressed signal, so you can keep the dynamics of your picking at full clean on one side or commit entirely to compression on the other. Comp raises the ratio and the sustain together as you turn it clockwise, and Tone walks the whole pedal from dark and thick to bright and open. The Single Coil / Humbucker voicing switch sets the recovery speed, which is a simple way of saying it lets the compressor breathe at the right rate for your pickups. 

Flipping between true bypass and buffered operation happens at the footswitch. Hold it down for two seconds and the LED blinks twice for true bypass or three times for buffered. Keeley sets it to buffered at the factory because that's where most boards will want it. The super-silent switching buffer does its work without a click or a pop, and with 9-18 V compatibility and an ultra-low current draw, the pedal is happy to share a power supply with anything else on your board. It all lives in the same proprietary battle-tested enclosure Keeley has been bolting to pedalboards for years.

How do you make the Keeley Compressor better without losing anything about what guitarists fell in love with in the first place? That's not an easy question. However, twenty-five years and more than 160,000 compressors later, we think you'll agree the Compressor Plus Germanium is the best compressor Keeley has made yet.