Description
The Dark Side condenses three distinct pedal stages into one hand-built enclosure, letting you reorder your signal chain instead of hunting for extra board space. It’s built around three cores: a fuzz section, a tape-style delay, and a modulation block that covers flanger, rotary speaker, U-Vibe, and phaser duties.
- Fuzz: Rooted in a 1977 op-amp fuzz circuit and reworked from the transistor-based approach used in the Psi Fuzz, this side delivers a big, saturated fuzz that stays surprisingly transparent — plenty of sustain without burying the character of single coils or humbuckers.
- Delay: A multi-head tape delay with 12 syncopated, rhythmic delay settings modeled on spinning-drum tape units. Subtle filtering recreates vintage warmth, while modern touches like expression-pedal control over repeat count and feedback-oscillation delay give it real flexibility.
- Modulation: Blend across four voices — an Electric Lady-style flanger, a Les-Rotary cabinet emulation, an opto-coupler-based U-Vibe, and a phaser — to land anywhere from vintage swirl to entirely new textures.
An onboard TRS expression pedal jack (compatible with pedals like M-Audio or Moog) opens up real-time tweaking during a set. Newer units include a push-button switch to flip the order of the fuzz and modulation/delay sections on the fly; older units use a TRS insert point so you can drop in an external phaser or chorus between the fuzz and delay stages — for example, running Fuzz > Phaser > Delay.
Inside, a hand-built board pairs analog fuzz circuitry with a 24-bit DSP engine, hand-assembled and soldered by Keeley’s technicians. The rotary, flanger, U-Vibe, and phaser voicings here are distinct from those found in other Keeley pedals, giving Dark Side its own sonic identity rather than duplicating existing units.
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