One Knob, Twenty-Five Years, and a Pull Switch That Changed Everything: The Keeley Katana Clean Boost

There is a particular kind of pedal that never wins a shootout on paper. It has one control. It does not distort. It has no presets, no toggles, no secret modes buried behind a power-up procedure. Plugged in and set flat, it is functionally invisible. On a spec sheet it looks like a rounding error next to almost anything else on a modern board.

And yet the Keeley Katana Clean Boost has been in continuous production, in one form or another, for over two decades. It has survived four cosmetic redesigns, an entire pedalboard-shrinking mini-pedal era, and the arrival of digital modellers that can synthesise a clean boost for free. It sits on the boards of a Welsh blues-rock guitarist, a Sigur Rós frontman, an R.E.M. founder, a Maroon 5 sideman, and — in the sentence that made it famous — a man who wrote about it on his own message board in January 2005, three years before any magazine got round to reviewing it.

This is the story of what is arguably the most quietly influential pedal Robert Keeley ever built, and, unusually for a piece this well known, it is also a story with a fair number of published errors attached to it. Some of those errors are in Keeley’s own product copy. We will get to those.

The Origin: A Pedal That Was Never Meant to Be a Keeley

The Katana is not, strictly speaking, a Keeley Electronics idea. Keeley’s own archived product page is refreshingly candid about this: the circuit “was originally designed for Legendary Tones for the Time Machine Boost but then became an independent product under the Keeley name after the Compressor came out.”

Unpack that and you get the actual chronology. Robert Keeley, working out of Oklahoma, was doing contract design work. Legendary Tones — a separate outfit — wanted a boost circuit for a product called the Time Machine Boost. Keeley designed one. Then the original Keeley Compressor happened, Keeley Electronics became a brand in its own right, and the boost circuit was spun out of the Time Machine and given its own enclosure and its own name.

Which makes the Katana Robert Keeley’s first guitar effect design for Keeley Electronics — a phrase the company repeats on every single Katana product page it has ever published. Not the first Keeley product to reach the public; that was the modified Ross-style Compressor that built the company’s reputation. But the first thing Keeley designed from scratch and put his own name on.

The same archived page throws in a detail that almost nobody quotes. Keeley’s very first effect pedal design, in 1999, was not a boost or a compressor at all. It was a digitally controlled analog delay with a built-in digital tuner, where delay times could be entered on a keypad in milliseconds or dialled in with potentiometers. Keeley says it worked perfectly and that the unit still turns up around the shop from time to time. In 1999. Consider what that tells you about the engineering appetite of a man whose most famous product has one knob.

Keeley Electronics itself dates to 2001 and marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in September 2026. The Katana has been there for almost all of it.

What the Katana Actually Is

Mechanically, it is the simplest pedal in this entire guide. One footswitch. One knob. That is the complete user interface.

The knob is a push/pull potentiometer, and the pull is where the pedal stops being ordinary.

Knob pushed in — Pure Clean. The pedal is a straight, high-headroom, transparent level control. Keeley’s own instruction copy describes it as “a volume control that goes to 20.” Turn it up and the signal gets louder without meaningfully changing shape. That is the entire promise, and delivering it convincingly is much harder than it sounds.

Knob pulled out — High Gain. The circuit re-voices into what Keeley calls “a cutting boost with a bit of gain. Not quite an overdrive, just overdriven tube grit and edge to your tone.” Harmonically fatter, a touch more forward, and capable of pushing a valve amp’s front end into genuine breakup on its own.

Underneath it are two things that matter more than the control count suggests. The first is the FET topology — Keeley uses JFET transistors in cascading Class A stages, and the company’s stated reasoning is that FETs give “the most tube like tone in a transistor design.” The second is a charge pump.

The Charge Pump Is the Whole Point

A boost pedal running off a normal 9V rail has a hard ceiling on how loud it can get before it starts clipping — not musically, but as a dying, flat-topped squash. The Katana sidesteps this by taking the 9V input and internally raising the operating voltage before the FET stages see the signal.

How much it raises it is, amusingly, a point of dispute between Keeley and the magazine that reviewed the pedal. Guitar World’s Eric Kirkland, writing in February 2008, described “a specially designed I.C. known as a charge pump” that “doubles the nine-volt input voltage to 18-volts before a set of FET transistors smoothly amplifies the sound.” Keeley’s own current product copy is more cautious: “we use a charge pump to nearly double operating voltage.” The practical answer is the same either way — the Katana has substantially more internal headroom than its power supply implies, which is why it can add a lot of level without adding grit.

Keeley attaches a warning to this that owners genuinely need to read: 9V DC is the maximum input voltage. The company spells it out on every product page, with what reads like the exasperation of a support desk that has answered this too many times — do not feed the pedal 18V hoping the doubler will turn it into 36V. Many boutique drives happily take 18V. This one does not.

Specifications

Three Published Boost Figures, and Why You Should Distrust All of Them

If you search for how much gain a Katana adds, you will find three different numbers, all traceable to Keeley, none of which describe the same product. This is worth spelling out because the wrong figure gets copied into buying guides constantly.

+22dB and +35dB come from the press release Keeley issued in February 2015 for the Katana Clean Boost Mini — a genuinely different product. The mini has two internal DIP switches rather than a push/pull knob; one selects between “a +22db colorless clean boost and a +35db overdrive creating boost,” and the other engages a treble shelving filter for added warmth. Total maximum output of the mini is +35dB. It launched at $119.

+30dB comes from the current full-size Throwback White product page, which says: “Pull the control knob for extra +30db Boost.”

And for the standard Pure Clean mode of the full-size pedal, Keeley has never published a dB figure at all.

So: the mini’s numbers do not describe the full-size pedal, the full-size pedal’s single published figure describes only the pulled-out mode, and the mode most people buy the pedal for is unspecified. Any article confidently telling you “the Katana gives you 35dB of clean boost” has merged two products. Treat the pedal by ear, not by decibel claim.

And While We Are Correcting Things: There Is No Speed Knob

Keeley’s own copy for the two-mode explanation reads, verbatim, on the archived Katana Boost page, the limited black run, and the current Throwback White page: “With the speed knob Pushed In, think of it as a volume control that goes to 20.” A few lines later the same page says “Pull the Level knob out to switch.”

There is no speed control on a Katana. There has never been one. It is a copy-paste artefact that has survived at least three page rewrites and is still live on a page last modified in August 2026. If you are reading Keeley’s instructions and looking for a speed knob, stop looking. It is the Level knob, and it is the only knob.

Famous Players: Ranked by Evidence, Not by Fame

The Katana has an unusually long user list — an aggregator currently tracks twenty-five professional users — and an unusually wide quality spread in the sourcing behind it. Here is how it actually breaks down.

Tier One: John Mayer, in His Own Words, in 2005

This is the strongest artist connection on the pedal and it is stronger than most people realise, because the source is not a photograph or a video timestamp. It is Mayer typing.

In a gear message posted on 27 January 2005 — three years before Guitar World reviewed the pedal — Mayer wrote: “If you feel like your guitar just won’t cut it in the mix with your band, but you don’t necessarily want more overdrive, check out the Fulltone Fat-Boost, or the Keeley Katana. Kick it on for a solo, and it’s like having your own personal mixing engineer ride your fader. I use a Keeley-modded Boss BD-2 pedal as well.”

Two things about that quote deserve honesty. First, it is a recommendation of two pedals, not a declaration that the Katana is his. Second, it is the single best one-sentence description of what a clean boost is for that anyone has written: your own personal mixing engineer riding your fader.

The Katana went on to appear on Mayer’s Trio-era board and on photographs of his later Dead & Company rigs, alongside a Keeley-modified Boss BD-2 Blues Driver, an Ibanez Tube Screamer lineage that runs through the TS-10 and TS-808, a Klon Centaur, and Two-Rock amplification. The commonly reported Continuum-era chain runs Katana into overdrive one into overdrive two, with the Katana used consistently as the front-of-chain lift.

Fair caveat: Mayer’s board has changed constantly for twenty years, and no piece of gear survives on it by right. But the 2005 quote is dated, first-person, and predates the marketing. That is as clean as artist evidence gets.

Tier One: Chris Buck, Documented on Camera by Premier Guitar

Welsh guitarist Chris Buck of Cardinal Black is the best-documented current user. Premier Guitar’s John Bohlinger filmed his Rig Rundown at Nashville’s Basement East, published 31 July 2024, and the Katana is listed explicitly in the published pedal chain.

The full board, in order, is worth reproducing because it shows exactly where a Katana lives on a serious modern rig: a Dunlop Cry Baby first, then a ThorpyFX Electric Lightning (Buck’s signature drive), a 29 Pedals EUNA, three Mythos drives, a Snouse BlackBox Overdrive 2, a Great Eastern FX Small Speaker Overdrive, an Analog Man King of Tone, an Origin Effects Cali76, a Universal Audio Golden Reverberator — and then the Keeley Katana. Modulation follows, then a Line 6 HX Stomp XL, a UA Starlight and a Boss RE-202, all switched by a GigRig G3.

Note the position. After nine drives and a compressor, right at the end of the dirt section. The Katana on that board is not a tone-shaper. It is a solo lift applied to whatever combination is already running — which is precisely the use case Mayer described in 2005.

Buck has separately described the Katana as one of the first pedals he bought, around 2012–2013, and has referred to running it around 5 or 6 in its standard mode.

Tier Two: Photographically and Video-Confirmed

Peter Buck (R.E.M.) — the Katana is visible in a published photograph of his pedalboard. No interview corroboration, but the photo is unambiguous. Interesting on its own terms: the Katana is a boost pedal chiefly associated with blues-rock lead playing, and Buck is a rhythm player whose entire signature is jangle. A transparent level lift makes just as much sense there, which is part of the point.

Jónsi (Sigur Rós) — appears in his Premier Guitar Rig Rundown, visible on the board at around the six-and-a-half-minute mark. Not in our guitarist archive, so no internal link, but the source is a first-party magazine video rather than a fan submission.

James Valentine (Maroon 5) — visible on his board in a filmed rig walkthrough at around 7:42.

Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo) — photographed on his board.

Josh Farro (Paramore) — used a Katana boost during 2006 Warped Tour performances, with the pedal also noted in coverage of the Brand New Eyes recording sessions.

Laura Jane Grace (Against Me!) — appears in a 2011 Guitar Geek rig diagram, a source type that is generally reliable but is a third-party reconstruction rather than the artist’s own statement.

Ken (L’Arc-en-Ciel) — this one is unusually well documented and unusually overlooked in English-language coverage. The Katana appears in the multi-rack touring system that Japanese builder Free The Tone designed for the band’s 25th anniversary live event in 2017, with photographs published on Free The Tone’s own blog. A boutique rack integrator choosing to put a one-knob American boost inside a custom-built stadium rig is a meaningful endorsement.

Danny Jones (McFly) and Keshi — both self-published, both time-stamped, neither independently corroborated. Jones via an Instagram story, Keshi via a TikTok at the fourteen-second mark.

Tier Three: The Two Names Everyone Repeats, and the Single Sentence They All Come From

Search for Katana users and you will find Billy Gibbons and Dan Spitz named over and over, often in the same breath, often as the headline. Every one of those mentions traces back to one sentence, in one article, from February 2008.

Guitar World’s Eric Kirkland closed his Katana piece: “No wonder the Katana has found a place in the pedal boards of Z.Z. Top’s Billy Gibbons and Anthrax’s Dan Spitz, among many others.”

That is the whole evidential base. There is no accompanying photograph. There is no Rig Rundown. There is no interview in which either player discusses the pedal. Gibbons’s rig is one of the most exhaustively documented in rock and the Katana does not appear in the standard accounts of it. Spitz left Anthrax in 1995, rejoined for the 2005–2007 reunion run, and had left again by the time the article ran.

None of which makes the claim false. Kirkland was a working gear journalist writing in a major magazine and presumably had a reason to write it. But an eighteen-year-old unsourced clause in a review is a very thin thing to build a “used by Billy Gibbons” headline on, and it has been load-bearing for a great many blog posts since. We are flagging it rather than repeating it.

Tone Recipes and Settings

A one-knob pedal has fewer settings than it has uses. The variables here are position in the chain, mode, and how hard the amp is already working.

How It Compares

Buying Guide, September 2026

The Katana’s availability picture in 2026 is genuinely confusing, and reporting it accurately matters more than picking a headline.

The original is archived. The current one is not. The original “Katana Boost,” SKU KkatanaClean, sits in Keeley’s Archive category with an Archive tag — that is a genuinely discontinued product. The current Throwback White edition, SKU NEW-KATANA-WHITE, sits in the live Distortion, Drive, Boost & Fuzz category with an Active tag, on a page last modified in August 2026. So the model is current.

But Keeley cannot sell you one directly. The Throwback White page shows $199.00 and Out of Stock. This is now a well-established pattern with Keeley in 2026 — Active-tagged, current-priced, and simultaneously unavailable from the factory store. It has been true of the Caverns V2 and the D&M Drive within the same year. Do not read it as discontinuation, and do not read it as normal supply either.

The retail spread is enormous. As of early September 2026, Guitar Center was listing the Katana at $84.15, down from $99.00, flagged as an all-time low price. Sweetwater was at $169.15, down from $199.00. Used examples were turning up around $117. The tracked average across merchants sits near $142.

That is a $115 gap between the cheapest new price and Keeley’s own list price for the same circuit. If you want one, the answer is straightforward: buy the discounted new unit while it is there. An all-time-low price on a currently produced boutique pedal is not a signal you should overthink.

Which colourway? Keeley has run the current-generation Katana in black, Throwback White, an Outdoorsman edition, an XIX Anniversary edition, a PWKY Custom Shop edition and an Arlon Prince NOS Custom Shop edition, among others. These are cosmetic. The owner who reviewed the Throwback White on Keeley’s own site was explicit that he was reviewing a PWKY unit because “the innards are the same.” Buy on price and availability, not on finish — unless you specifically want a white pedal you can find with your foot on a dark stage, which is a real and underrated argument.

Old versus new. The current generation is not a redesign of the circuit so much as a return to it. Keeley’s own framing: “We listened to what our players wanted and went back to our roots. The new Katana uses the original JFETs that made the original so special. We used the same component values from the original Katana, and updated the Boost mode to offer a more robust, clear sound, giving more clarity to bass notes when engaged.” So the pulled-out mode is the part that changed, in the direction of tighter low end. Everything else is the 2000s circuit. A vintage Katana is not a superior object; it is an older one.

Living With One

The knob is the best and worst thing about it. Keeley made it oversized, aluminium, and side-mounted specifically so that you can change the boost amount with your foot mid-song — “roll the volume knob forward with your foot and you’ll be good to go.” That is a genuinely clever piece of design thinking and almost nobody uses it. What everybody does notice is that a large knob sticking out of the side of a pedal is, in the words of one tester, “not exactly pedalboard efficient.” On a tightly packed board you will lose more real estate than the enclosure dimensions suggest. Plan for it.

Power it correctly. 9V DC, centre-negative, 9V maximum. It draws around 5mA, so it will run happily off any output on any supply. It also takes a 9V battery, which is unusual for a modern Keeley and is worth knowing if you ever need to solve a problem on a stage floor with no free outlet.

Where to put it. There are two correct answers and they do different jobs. Last in the dirt section makes it a solo lift that leaves your drives untouched. First in the chain makes it a driver that pushes everything downstream harder. Chris Buck’s board demonstrates the former; Mayer’s Continuum-era chain demonstrates the latter. Try both before you decide the pedal does not do what you wanted.

The one honest criticism. Every collected complaint about this pedal reduces to the same sentence: it may be too subtle for players wanting dramatic effect changes. That is not a defect. It is a correct description of the product. If you plug in a Katana expecting your tone to transform, you have bought the wrong pedal — and it is a testament to how the pedal is marketed that this misunderstanding is as common as it is. Aggregated user ratings sit at 4.8 out of 5 across forty-one ratings, with that single recurring caveat.

What it pairs with. Looking at what Katana owners actually run alongside it, the most common companions are the Fulltone OCD, a Fulltone Full-Drive 2, a Line 6 DL4, a Strymon Flint, a Keeley Compressor Plus, a Boss tuner and a Fender ’65 Deluxe Reverb. That is a blues-rock board of a very specific and very recognisable kind. The Katana is not, in practice, a metal pedal — though Dan Spitz’s alleged use and the punk-and-thrash players who swear by it into a cranked Marshall suggest the pedal is more genre-agnostic than its user list implies.

Frequently Asked Questions