Crazy Tubes Circuits Locomotive

The Crazy Tubes Locomotive is a tube driven Overdrive pedal. It runs a full sized ECC83 tube at high voltage. No cooling slits or windows permit the eye to behold such a feat, which is a bit of an understatement. To make up for that, Crazy Tubes decided to paint the pedal in the brightest pink they could find.

This pedal features 4 knobs:
Tone is a passive tone blend. Fully CW it does nothing.
Gain is gain.
Mean is the output of the wet signal
Clean is the output of the dry signal.

With the Tone fully CW, the clean blend off and the gain around noon, I get a signal that is on the brighter side of things. The baked in tone steals a little bit of the bass frequencies and adds a little around the top. This is totally okay with me. I can counteract both by turning back the tone knob and by blending in clean signal. I found that I liked the brighter tone, so I looked for the point where bypassed signal and wet signal had an even amount of treble and then set it a bit higher than that. It’s not harsh, but higher notes get a pearly texture now. With the bass loss I did the same – I plucked a low note and set the clean blend until I could not perceive any loss of lows when switching the pedal on and off. After that, I set the mean knob so I get unity and then there’s only the gain knob left to dial in.

One thing that the Locomotive can do, is being set essentially clean with just a hint of harmonic breakup which is barely there in the low notes because the unaffected root frequencies are too strong to make them audible.
When you play chords higher up the neck it’s beautiful. Turn the reverb up and you’re sitting there for an hour, plucking chords and letting them fade.
With the gain a little higher, you loose a bit of dynamic range up there while chording, but you get more saturation and tube compression in exchange. The single notes are still audible and it’s not mushy at all.
Now there is some grit in the lower notes, but it does not yet feel like an overdrive effect. It’s more like an amp that is pushed outside the comfort zone but has not arrived at breakup level.
That happens if you increase the gain a touch more. Speaking of touch. The dynamic range is insane.
With a touch more of the gain knob, we’re where I want to go. I can still make chords sing, but now I have to watch out because if I pluck too hard, the notes bloom up with solid overdrive.
The lower registers are clean when I apply a softer touch, sound just a bit gravelly when I play normally and the bass gets downright angry as soon as I dig in.
All the while, I can clearly hear the sound, character and timbre of my bass. The lack of tone shaping controls plus the fact that the baked in sound really only favors a bit of the high spectrum while it chews off a bit of the low spectrum means that the options are somewhat limited – what you get is your bass sound plus tube magic.
I can really see how people could use this pedal as exactly that: A pedal for adding tube magic. It’s a great tube magic sprinkler for people who like understatement, though. I mean the enclosure does not have any openings that manage airflow on the one hand, but also show off the tube on the other hand. And it just says Locomotive. They don’t mention the tube.
Given the MSRP of €269, and the fact that it will run off standard 9V power supplies (provided they do have the juice, the draw is around 300mA), this is a great opportunity to get some REAL tube magic into your signal chain without breaking the bank. This is one of those pedals that run the tube at proper voltage levels, so it actually does something other than looking pretty.