Keeley D&M Drive

The Keeley D&M Drive is a dual overdrive pedal from Keeley Electronics, built in collaboration with Daniel Steinhardt and Mick Taylor, the hosts of That Pedal Show¹. One side is a boost, the other a drive, and the two can be stacked in either order: as the show's own product page puts it, "You can boost the drive or drive the boost"². It arrived in 2017 at a street price of $229³¹.

The idea behind the pairing is straightforward. Each side can be used completely independently, or stacked into the other in either order, so a player can run the boost into the drive for what the launch announcement called "the super-gained harmonic bliss of boost into drive," or the drive into the boost for "the solo lifting punch of drive into boost"¹. Each side has its own on/off footswitch, so the two circuits are switched separately⁴⁵.

The two sides and their controls

The Boost side carries Mick Taylor's flavor and the Drive side Daniel Steinhardt's². Mick designed the boost; Daniel specified the drive⁶. The launch announcement described the drive as Dan's full-range overdrive/distortion and the boost as Mick's more mid-humped, boosty drive¹.

Both sides carry the same control set, and a single toggle on the enclosure selects the order of the two effects in the signal chain⁴.

On the Drive side, Keeley's announcement says it delivers "from its lowest settings where you feel like you've discovered the perfect pro sounding overdrive to the roar of a high end amp," with heavily saturated punch, dynamics and sustain¹. The Drive section was specified by Daniel to offer a bit more drive than his favorite Analog Man King Of Tone⁶. On the Boost side, the company places it "somewhere in between a clean boost like the high voltage Keeley Katana and a germanium modded professional overdrive," with headroom and a distinct mid-range voice¹.

As for what the circuits actually are: Guitar World describes the two sides as a Boost (Klone) side and a Drive (O.C.D.) side³. MusicRadar's reviewer, noting Mick's taste for Tube Screamers and Klons, found "more than a hint of that in how this gets more out of your amp"⁶.

Power and connections: TRS loop-switcher mode

The pedal requires a nine-volt power supply and cannot be battery powered⁵. MusicRadar's reviewer also flagged that the position of the nine-volt power input could make some types of connectors awkward⁶.

The more unusual connection feature is a TRS mode for players who use loop-based pedal switchers such as the G2 by TheGigRig⁷. With the two sides split onto separate TRS cables, a loop switcher can call up any combination of drive, boost and stacking order with one touch, and the individual sides can be placed in separate loops as part of presets⁷. Setting it up, as demonstrated by Dan and Mick:

1. Open the back plate; there are four DIP switches inside.
2. Move all four DIP switches to the up position, which is explained on the back of the PCB.
3. Plug a TRS cable into the input jack and another into the output jack.
4. On the input TRS, the tip is the input and the ring is the output; on the other side the ring is the input and the tip is the output, so the two sides are opposite⁷.

In the demo, the boost side ended up in loop five of a G2 and the drive side in loop six, letting each side be switched on its own or combined in either order⁷. If you don't use a loop switcher, none of this matters; the pedal works normally as a dual overdrive⁷.

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History: That Pedal Show's signature pedal

The D&M Drive came out of a collaboration between Robert Keeley and the two That Pedal Show hosts⁸. The first 100 pedals were sold exclusively through the That Pedal Show store, with a presale beginning Wednesday April 26 at 20:00 GMT+1 and first orders shipping May 7 to 10². MusicRadar reported the general release, on sale from 4 May 2017 for $229⁹. The pedal went on to sell over 10,000 units in its first three years, according to Robert Keeley in a 2020 Guitar.com interview¹⁰.

Two limited editions followed. In 2020, That Pedal Show collaborated with Robert Keeley FX on the Label Maker Limited Edition: 200 pedals in total, 140 sold through the That Pedal Show store and 20 each through Keeley, Andertons and Pedal Empire¹¹. Inside it is the regular D&M Drive circuit, with the knobs changed for Marshall-style knobs and Dymo label maker graphics on 190 of them; the other 10, the Naked editions, have no graphics and come with a Dymo label maker and tape so the owner can create their own labels¹¹. Early purchase was offered exclusively to current TPS Patrons via Patreon before the public sale¹¹.

In 2022 came the Altered History edition, a custom shop limited-edition version hand-modded and signed by Robert Keeley, retailing at $259³. The mods reduce the output volume taper of the Boost (Klone) side and nudge the maximum gain of the Drive (O.C.D.) side upwards, with Keeley saying the sounds are largely identical to the original, just at different settings³. The enclosures carry new Cuneiform artwork depicting Ereshkigal, the queen of the night or underworld in Mesopotamian mythology, with Dan and Mick depicted as her lions, plus UV-printed backplates and aluminum knobs³.

What reviewers said

The pedal won Guitar.com's Gear Of The Year 2017 Best Effects Pedal award, where it was described as promising "the full gamut of drive tones, from clean boost to searing rock leads"⁸. Pedal of the Day was equally taken with it:

That review called the Drive side "simply brilliant," noting the boost is full with drive tendencies when maxed while the drive goes from crunchy to high-gain⁴. Gearnews called it "a decent drive pedal, especially given the flexibility of setting the effect order and the added control via the Gig Rig system"¹², and Delicious Audio summed it up as "a rather straightforward but great sounding dual gain Boost + Overdrive"¹³.

MusicRadar's 2026 review went deeper on the two sides. On the boost, the reviewer found "emphasised midrange with a frisson of frequencies that add more authority to the sound of single coils, sounding great on our Strat and with P-90s"⁶. On the drive, it "can go from low-level gritty raunch to the throaty sound of a full-on driven amp with all of the sustain and rich harmonics that entails"⁶. On stacking, the reviewer wrote: "we really like the way that the Boost before the Drive ups the saturation quota," adding that both routing options have their relative merits⁶.

Mick Taylor himself, in a 2018 Q&A video, said the way he has the D&M Drive set with both sides on is his own version of the Dumble sound, and that stacked or single-sided "it kind of negates a lot of other Drive pedals that I might otherwise need"¹⁴.

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For players weighing it against other dual drives, the same Guitar.com roundup that awarded it Gear Of The Year listed it alongside the Analog Man King Of Tone at $265 and the Strymon Sunset at £249, a comparison that lines up with the King Of Tone reference in the drive side's own design brief¹⁵⁶. More broadly, it sits in Keeley's overdrive range alongside pedals like the Keeley Super Phat Mod and the Keeley Oxblood, while the boost side's Klone circuit places it among the many overdrive pedals inspired by the Klon Centaur.

Videos

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Questions