Keeley Tone WorksTaTion £239

John Mayer helped bring this ‘multi-pedal’ solution out of retirement, with a no-fuss front-end for your amp that can save you ’board space and cash…

- Trevor Curwen

Keeley’s Workstation range puts several of the company’s effects into one pedal chassis, retaining individual switching but saving on pedalboard space while keeping leads and cables to a minimum. These ‘multi-pedals’ also represent a substantial saving over buying the pedals separately.

The Tone Workstation has a bit of a back story. Keeley built a small batch of them about 10 years ago – giving them the status of collector’s items these days, of course! – but they came into the public eye again when John Mayer recently took two of the originals out on tour. Consequently, Keeley has taken that original design and put it in a smaller pedalboard-friendly enclosure and re-engineered the design with a set of enhanced features.

Basically, the design remit was to create a whole ‘front end’: a pedal to sit at the beginning of your signal chain and be the first stage in sculpting your sound. What we get here are the first three links in that chain. So you can have a compressor, a boost and an overdrive, or a compressor and two overdrives, depending on how you want to run it. The signal chain starts with a version of the respected Keeley compressor then runs into a section that can either voice the 1962 British amp-style overdrive or the Katana clean boost, and finally hits the Tube Screamer-styled Red Dirt overdrive.

Sounds