Robert Keeley Hot Rod Mods his D&M Drive in Limited Altered History Red and Purple Editions

In the wake of the superb Ghost Prism Fuzz Bender Limited Edition - we now have the perfect culmination of Dan Steinhardt’s and Mick Taylor’s Signature D&M Drive. This was obviously famously modelled on their favourite dual drive pedal of the time - the Analog.Man King of Tone - but with very much their preferences in mind and a little more range on both sides / channels of the pedal.

You have the simplest of controls - Volume, Drive and Tone per side, and a Toggle-switch to set stacking order of the two channels.

I was just commenting during my review of the Ghost Prism how I was really after a cool custom shop edition of the D&M drive - and lo-and-behold - just as the doctor ordered! We have two very special editions of 25 Units each of Nergal Red colourway, and Ninazu Purple colourway. I was delighted to secure one of the Purple ones - and I will be feeding back further when that lands in a few weeks’ time.

I’m obviously a big fan of this format - as I own the King of Tone already, and the VS Audio Royal Flush which is very much based on the same sort of format and highly complementary combination.

Robert Keeley says of this release :

"I wanted to make a few changes, mods if you will, but I didn’t really want to change it that much, after all, it is an amazing tone machine as it stands. I simply wanted to reduce the output volume taper of the Boost (Klone) side and I also wanted to nudge the maximum gain of the Drive (OC.D.) upwards. All that is different with the Altered History D&M Drives, is that the Boost has an A-taper pot for the volume, and the drive side has a 1Meg gain control instead of a 500K potentiometer. Largely the sounds will be identical, just at different settings on the pedal. The artwork is of Ereshkigal, queen of the dark or underworld.  The lettering and Keeley logo are in an imagined cuneiform font. These special D&Ms have been given the complete Keeley Custom Shop treatment, including UV-printed backplates that include the serial number. The knobs are high quality aluminum. The artwork is designed to look like ancient ruins, or at least circa 2000’s boutique pedal era silkscreen."

Keeley is fast evolving into the same mould as Beetronics - where it’s not really worth buying the initial editions as you always get much better looking custom editions eventually. With Beetronics I alway wait now for the custom editions to materialise and for one that really appeals to me visually - before I pull the trigger.

The D&M is really smart of the heavy hitters in this format for being in vertical orientation - which makes it much more pedalboard-friendly than all its peers.

There were only 25 units of each edition - priced at $259 - I would imagine those would be long gone by the time this article goes live. April 1st is a great day to publish this article - as superficially this seems like it could be an April Fool’s - at least for those that weren’t aware of the release a day earlier.

I know there are plenty of you TPS fans that read this blog - so I’m sure plenty of you have the D&M Drive already. For me it’s probably the King Tone 2022 Edition of The Duellist up next - while these are all coming in a big thick and fast - so I may just have to take my foot off the accelerator a little to give each of these its deserved innings / rotation in the chain!

Keeley for sure seems to be on a roll these days! And particularly as regards all these handsome looking Custom Editions that keep materialising!