Keeley Katana Mini

The Keeley Katana Mini is a compact boost pedal from Keeley Electronics, the smaller sibling of the Keeley Katana. It is a clean, transparent boost: it raises the level of your signal to push an amp harder or lift a solo, rather than adding its own heavy clipping. Guitar.com describes it as "a very clean and a very transparent boost pedal made with cascading FETs"¹.

What It Does

The Katana Mini takes the core of the full-sized Katana Clean Boost and shrinks it. Its signal path runs through dual cascaded JFET transistors, the same class of circuit approach as the original Katana, which Guitar World described in its review of that pedal as a Class A design⁵². JFETs (junction gate field-effect transistors) behave in some ways like tube gain stages, which is part of why the Katana family is associated with clean, amp-like boosting rather than harsh clipping.

Guitar.com's Cillian Breathnach sums up what the pedal is for:

So the Mini covers two jobs: a straight volume lift that keeps your tone intact, and, when you want it, a hotter setting that drives the front end of the amp into breakup¹.

Controls

The Mini keeps its control surface minimal. There is a huge range of volume available on the single knob, and the full-sized Katana's Pull Boost mode, which on the larger pedal is engaged by pulling the volume pot up, is integrated into the upper ranges of the Mini's volume knob instead¹. Turn the knob high enough and you get the extra push without a separate switch. Internal micro-switches add overdrive options beyond that⁵.

On the full-sized Katana, that boost switching is handled by a two-position DPDT switch, either push-pull or toggle, and the volume pot sits at the output and will take the level down to nothing, according to a technical analysis of the circuit by IvIark at Guitar FX Layouts⁶.

Where It Came From

The Katana circuit has a long history. It was originally designed for Legendary Tones for the Time Machine Boost, then became an independent product under the Keeley name after the Compressor came out⁶. It was Robert Keeley's first guitar effect design for Keeley Electronics⁷⁶. In a 2024 interview with Vertex Effects, Robert Keeley pointed to the Katana as an example of the push-pull pot approach in his designs⁷. An updated version of the Katana Clean Boost, reviewed by Pedal of the Day in March 2024, kept the original JFETs and component values with modern construction².

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