Crazy Tube Circuits Sidekick Jr review – the ultimate compact ambient pedal?
€289, crazytubecircuits.com
There was a time when giant pedalboards were the preserve of rockstars only – The Edge, David Gilmour, Kevin Shields et al. Nowadays, it seems like every bedroom soundscaper or function band guitarist thinks they need a board the size of a small shipping container paired with some sort of overly engineered and entirely unnecessary MIDI switching system.
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Part of this is the pedals’ fault, admittedly – as the processing power inside our little boxes of joy has got ramped up, so seemingly has the form factor. As a result, our ’boards are frequently getting ever more unwieldy and uncompromising – especially for those of us who play on stages (or live in environments) where such gargantuan things are simply not physically practical. There simply has to be another way.
Enter then, Crazy Tube Circuits. The Greek boutique effects brand has its own share of big-format pedals, but they’re also catering to those of us who want to capture some of that big box ambient magic without the trunk-filling form factor – enter the Sidekick Jr.
The Sidekick Jr
What is the Crazy Tube Circuits Sidekick Jr?
In essence, the Sidekick Jr is a scaled-down version of one of those above-mentioned big pedals. Released back in 2019, the original Sidekick is a chunky double-wide, three-switch beast that was designed to offer three popular ambient-adjacent sounds – delay, reverb and chorus – in a package that was simple, intuitive and dispensed with a lot of the faff and menu-diving that many of these pedals tend to involve.
The Sidekick Jr takes things one step further by retaining much of the core stuff of its bigger brother – a delay/reverb/chorus pedal with simple controls aimed at soundscape creation – and goes even harder. Not only does this pedal squeeze all of this into a classic compact pedal form factor, it actually has more sounds on tap than the original Sidekick. You get six reverb types, two delays, two choruses and a flanger.
So how exactly do you squeeze all that into a pedal with one fewer footswitch than the original without cutting so many corners you end up in the tire wall? The answer isn’t straightforward.
The Sidekick Jr
Is the Crazy Tube Circuits Sidekick Jr easy to use?
It’s actually some achievement that the Sidekick Jr manages to retain much of the functionality and key controls of the original in such a small form factor. And to be honest, most of the stuff that’s missing – DI and headphone outs, ground lift, speaker emulation – is honestly not the sort of thing that I, the guy moaning about massive pedalboards up top, would really care about in the first place.
The compromise, such as it is, comes with the scaling down from three to two switches. This means that you don’t have the ability to independently activate the chorus/flanger function on the pedal – you simply have a small toggle to choose which of the two sounds that do have switches (reverb or delay) you’re going to pair the modulation with – you can’t just bypass the sound altogether, you have to pick one or the other.
I say you have to, you don’t really – if you pair the Sidekick Jr with CTC’s XT external footswitch, you can switch the modulation on and off independently and it becomes effectively just as powerful as the full-sized Sidekick. The problem with this is twofold – now you have to find space for a matchbox-sized external switch on your board, and also it costs €49, pushing the price above that of its full-sized brethren and into the chummed waters of Strymon, Meris and the like.
This fairly substantial caveat aside, the Sidekick Jr is a refreshing doddle to use. So many compact multi-function pedals get bogged down in offering you too much control, with too many knobs, switches and the like to actually make it more intuitive than a big boy modeller. The Jr just gives you a colour-coordinated section for each effect, and a small assortment of easily understood knobs, toggles and soft-touch buttons to tweak the parameters and select the various voices.
It’s about the most straightforward and user-friendly way to cram it all into one pedal that you could imagine, but it’s not without its hiccups. For example, the reverb’s ‘excite’ control is nebulously named for a reason. Depending on the mode selected it can tweak quite radically different parameters, so a quick glance at the manual is necessitated before diving headlong in, which is exactly what I’m going to do next. Those soundscapes won’t soundscape themselves after all.
Does the Crazy Tube Circuits Sidekick Jr sound good?
The looks and general vibe of this pedal is straight out of the 1980s, and so it shouldn’t be a shock to learn that a lot of the sounds on board lean steadfastly into that direction – sometimes unsubtly so.
A good place to start in this regard is the chorus/flanger sounds, which hit the sensible crowd-pleasing emulations of a classic Boss CE-1, a DC-2 Dimension Chorus and a nebulous flanger that CTC describes as being, “inspired by a classic flanger pedal being set up as a slow chorus with mild feedback”.
And look, these sounds are genuinely great if you like that sort of thing – all the most outré ’80s chorus touchstones are found on tap here. But if you’re looking for something a little more subtle or textural, you’d best look elsewhere – without a mix control to speak of, there’s not really a way to tame that flock of seagulls, it’s bouffant or nothing here, even with the external control switch.
The Sidekick Jr
The standout sounds, however, are the reverbs. Of the six sounds, three are what you’d call ‘standard’ fare – spring, plate and hall – and these sounds are impressively authentic and convincing, offering near-studio levels of fidelity and organic character. The other three, accessed by hitting the ‘bank’ button, are certainly not standard – though to be honest given the current proliferation of ‘weird’ reverbs, what even is standard these days?
The gated mode leans hard into the look of the pedal offering with gated verb sound that starts off in the ’80s but with its horizons firmly expanded. The shimmer mode – a polarising course on any reverb menu – manages to tame the most egregious tendencies of the form while still giving loads of headroom for weird and lush sonic experimentation. Finally, the excite mode is effectively a hall mode with the roof blown off – if there’s an end to the decay on tap here, I didn’t find it.
After two prime cuts of ambient goodness with the first two effects on tap, the delay section is something of a comedown. And really you can feel it from the progress (or lack thereof) from the original – there are no bonus modes or extra features added to the original, just the fairly underwhelming ‘digital’ and ‘tape’ modes. They sound good – they sound great when used to garnish the reverb and modulation sounds, and perhaps that’s the point here. But for a pedal of this price point, I was expecting something a little more inspirational, and certainly it left me with the feeling that if any of the sounds here deserved to be relegated to an external switch, it’s the delay not the modulation that should be first in line.
The Sidekick Jr
Is the Crazy Tube Circuits Sidekick Jr worth buying?
There are a lot of pedals that claim to offer unfettered ambient revolutions in this day and age, but the Sidekick Jr definitely offers something that the others don’t – both in terms of the form factor, the usability and the quality of sounds on offer. If you’re new to this whole soundscaping game and want a simple and great-sounding pedal that can set you on your journey, this is a great option. Equally, if you’re looking for something that can offer a plethora of great ambient sounds in a form factor that can slot in on any small board build, this might be a killer option.
Crazy Tube Circuits Sidekick Jr alternatives
There really aren’t any stompboxes currently in production that do what the Sidekick Jr does – the Harley Benton Sugar & Spice offers chorus/delay and reverb but not all three at once, while there are plenty of other pedals that do either modulated delay or modulated reverb but not both. Of those, I’m a big fan of the EarthQuaker Devices Afterneath, which is a wonderfully dark and moody modulated verb, while the Slöer from Walrus Audio is another wonderfully musical ambient pedal.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
