We stopped by the Crazy Tube Circuits booth at the NAMM Show for a demonstration of their latest pedals. The team had traveled from Athens, Greece, and took the time to walk us through their lineup in detail.
Crazy Tube Circuits is a boutique guitar effects pedal manufacturer based in Athens, Greece, founded by Christos Ntaifotis, an amp enthusiast and vintage tube collector whose friends started calling him the Crazy Tube Guy. The company is known for high-end, all-analog multi-voiced drive units and studio-grade digital ambient pedals. Its specialty is amp-in-a-box dual pedals, precise historical circuit emulations, and feature-rich layouts that often incorporate passive effects loops to allow separate pedal routing between individual internal channels.
The Ziggy, one of the company’s best known drives, is built to cover the ground between a Vox AC30 Top Boost and a Marshall JTM45, moving from a bright, mild overdrive into thicker, crunchier territory as the gain is pushed. It has found its way onto the boards of players like Dweezil Zappa and Nels Cline, alongside newer designs such as the Golden Ratio Phi, a dual compressor that runs both FET and optical circuits at once. The Blackface Stardust, built around three distinct maxed out amp voicings and an all-analog signal path with discrete MOSFET gain stages, covers similar ground from a vibrant clean tone into a crunchier, more aggressive one.
Crazy Tube Circuits’ line of guitar effects pedals now include Ziggy, Golden Ratio, Starlight, Black Magic Mk2, Blackface Stardust, Splash Mk3, Pin Up, Vyagra Mk2, Time Mk2, Space Charged, Planet B, StonedHz and SPT.
Crazy Tube Circuits shared the show with fellow Athens builder Tsakalis AudioWorks, another Greek pedal company working the same corner of the effects world. Seeing both booths within a short walk of each other was a good reminder that a lot of the most distinctive work in pedals right now comes out of small, independent shops rather than the show floor’s bigger names.
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