Crazy Tube Circuits White Whale Remote

The White Whale Remote is a remote control footswitch made by Crazy Tube Circuits for its White Whale family of analog spring reverb and tremolo pedals. It exists to solve one problem: the White Whale is a large pedal, and if it sits at the back of a pedalboard or off to the side of a stage rig, reaching down to tap its own bypass switches mid-song is awkward. The Remote gives you two switches of your own, in a small box you can place anywhere, that turn the pedal's tremolo and reverb sections on and off independently¹.

It is a simple accessory rather than an effect in its own right. It adds no sound, no buffering and no boost; it only reports switch presses down the cable to the White Whale, which does the actual true-bypass switching. That simplicity is also what makes it easy to power and cheap to run, since it needs no power at all¹.

What it does

The White Whale, in both its original and V2 forms, is a real spring reverb and analog tremolo pedal with two separate effect sections, each with its own true bypass. On the V2, the two onboard footswitches engage or bypass each section and feature a power-up bypass/engage preset function, so you can choose which effects come up when the pedal powers on⁴. The Remote mirrors those two bypass functions in a second location: one switch for the tremolo section, one for the reverb section¹.

A second use case comes from the V2's design. Its remote switcher input jack is built to accept either an external effects switcher or the matching Remote dual footswitch, sold separately⁴. Delicious Audio's coverage of the V2 makes the same point, noting that the remote input jack lets you control the bypass state of each effect section remotely, and that each effect has its own true bypass function via the onboard footswitches or remote switching units⁵. So the Remote is the maker's own first-party option for players who are not running a full switching system but still want remote control.

Connecting it to White Whale V1 and V2

The Remote works with both generations of the pedal, but the two generations use different jacks for it, so the hookup step differs¹.

On the V2, the Remote jack sits alongside the pedal's other connections. Guitar World's review of the V2 lists its connections as a standard input, standard output, standard TRS Trem XP, standard TRS Reverb XP and a standard TRS Remote jack⁶. The Remote jack being TRS is why the Remote needs a TRS cable rather than a standard guitar cable: one stereo cable carries both switching signals, one per effect section. The cable is not included with the Remote, so you need to supply your own¹.

On the original White Whale, there is no dedicated Remote jack, so the pedal's reverb expression input jack does double duty. You plug the Remote in there and move an internal assign slider switch to the FX SW position, which tells the pedal to treat that jack as a switch input rather than an expression input¹. It is worth checking that slider if the Remote ever seems unresponsive on a V1.

Power and the onboard footswitches

The Remote is fully passive. Crazy Tube Circuits states plainly that no power is needed for the remote footswitch to operate properly¹. There is no adapter, no battery and no current draw; all the switching electronics live inside the White Whale itself. The V2 pedal it drives runs on a 9V DC adapter, not supplied, at 180 mA⁶, but that is the pedal's requirement, not the Remote's.

One question players often have about add-on switchers is whether plugging one in disables the pedal's own switches. Here it does not. Crazy Tube Circuits specifies that the remote footswitch connection will not bypass the on-board footswitches, and that both can be used at the same time¹. In practice that means you can leave the Remote permanently connected at the front of your board and still use the White Whale's own switches when you are setting up or adjusting things at the pedal itself.

The Remote and the White Whale Junior

The Remote is specified for the White Whale V1 and V2 only¹. It does not extend to the White Whale Junior, the compact third member of the family announced in June 2026. The Junior uses the exact same three-spring reverb assembly as its larger siblings, driven by a dedicated analog power amp⁸⁹, but its connectivity is listed by MusicRadar's review as input, output and power only, with no remote or switcher jack⁸. There is simply nowhere to plug the Remote in on that pedal.

The Junior also handles switching differently: tremolo and reverb each get their own soft-touch bypass footswitch on the pedal itself, and MusicRadar found it easy enough to use, with a stripped-down control surface compared to its larger sibling, awarding four and a half stars for usability⁸. Players who want the Junior's smaller footprint but need remote switching are, on the current specification, out of luck.

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