Hello Gearheads! Welcome back to the warm and sometimes fuzzy space where I get to share with you fun and exciting gear that crosses my path. Today, I’m pleased to showcase another one of Robert Keeley’s sonic masterpieces. I’ve had the happy chance to review another pedal in the semi-recent releases that Keeley and team are putting out - the Rotary (a very realistic and fantastic rotating speaker simulator). It seems that everything coming from the Keeley Labs these days warrants a closer look, as they are pushing the boundaries between form, function and of course tone. I find Robert’s enthusiasm for their boundary pushing to be inspiring and a very joyful experience to say the least. Robert’s one of the good ones and he’s been doing THIS since the very beginnings of the boutique pedal boom.
The Nocturne is simply a well designed and crafted reverb pedal. Created in collaboration with guitarist and artist Andy Timmons. Timmons and Keeley released a few different versions of the HALO delay pedal, another well revered design set to replicate Timmon’s favorite dual delay setup. The Nocturne was born out of a curiosity if a reverb pedal could operate in the same manner as the Halo - never getting in the way of the guitar’s voice and creating a cloud like texture behind the guitar’s voice. What resulted from this curiosity was a very musical outcome and ultimately the Nocturne reverb algorithm. Not to be shortsighted, Keeley added in plate and spring reverb algorithms to round out the Nocturne.
“The Nocturne “sound” is essentially the beauty of what we all love
about the Halo sound, but without the cross talk of repeats of the delays.
It’s reverb achieved (created) from a completely different angle.
“What If?” “Could We?” It’s the sound I’ve been hearing, but was unable
to get with other reverbs. It’s the most inspiring reverb I’ve ever heard and
I just want to play all day basking in its beauty.”
In short, the Nocturne is just a great sounding reverb pedal. It offers what many modern guitarists seek: presets, stereo input and outputs and expression and remote control. You can also run the Nocturne as a simple mono source with great results. That’s one of my favorite aspects about how Keeley and team design their pedals… they go as far as they can with offering as much as possible but the face of the unit, the actual form is SO dead simple to operate and to use in real life scenarios that not one extreme of the pendulum of gear aficionado is left out in the cold. I personally live somewhere in the middle of those extremes, a gearheads sweet-spot if you would, where I don’t employ stereo devices in pedal form as I prefer to run them as a mono source into the front end of an amplifier. You might think that using such a robustly capable pedal in mono form would be limiting but it’s actually not at all - there’s so much width and expansiveness even in mono.
As with all the recent pedals Keeley has come out with, the secondary controls are easy to manipulate. A quick twist of a knob while holding down a footswitch, saving presets on the pedal with ease and surprisingly being able to have a preset and the current WYSIWYG “What You See Is What You Get” all between a toggle of the preset footswitch is highly useful.
In my demo below I seemed to gravitate towards the Spring Reverb and of course the Nocturne algorithm. Both sounds were very realistic and brought out some great creative moments for me. The Plate setting didn’t quite jump out to me, it’s meant to replicate the real plate unit at the Austin City Limits stage, which in and of itself is quite cool but for some reason there was a resonant peak that didn’t work for me. That said, I really loved the tone and feel of the Nocturne. My only gripe was that I just couldn’t get the Nocturne to be bright enough. You might be thinking that I’m crazy or that the first thing to go in our hearing as we age is the top end…. maybe so but that’s not the case here. There is an inherent warmth and beautiful tone present in all of the sounds that I think will make most people happy. In fact it made me happy most of the time! I do however like to replicate a specific Lexicon rack reverb tone with a loooooong decay where the mix is back so it just sits behind the notes, a lot like what Timmon’s Nocturne setting was designed to do… I just couldn’t get it bright enough. You can of course use the tone control and the secondary high pass filter but it just didn’t get there. It did however sound very natural and amazing! If I could get about a half more throw on that tone knob I’d be in heaven. I have it dimmed on the Nocturne setting and it’s lovely, just not quite a replacement for that rack reverb tone I love so much. It’s a small caveat but one nonetheless. The Spring reverb alone impressed me more than any dedicated Spring Reverb pedal and that’s not even the focus of the Nocturne!
There is something unique and very cool that’s going with Robert and team in regards to how release these new pedals. The enclosures tie them to a certain limitation that seemingly pushes them to create something not only great but also sonically inventive. I’ll often remark that having certain limitations pushes a creative to think outside the box and thus make something truly more artful than if they had all the options in the universe. I really dig the form factor of these pedals and look forward to what else is coming down the pike with Keeley Electronics. From what I can tell, this is truly a modern renaissance of tone shaping and sonic design!
Thanks for checking this Gearheads Feature on the Keeley Nocturne. If you’d like to learn more about Keeley Electronics please do check out these sites for more information.
https://www.facebook.com/KeeleyFX
https://www.instagram.com/keeleyelectronics/
Until next time Gearheads, please take a moment to Like, Subscribe & Share this Feature and I’ll see you all very soon!