When Carl Martin decided to create a baby-brother for his world famous Combinator, the details of simplifying an already simple effect controller made his head hurt. So Carl enlisted the help of Thomas Guldmann, and the Octaswitch was born. The concept is simple. Take your eight favourite effects pedals, plug them into the eight individual loops (all true-bypass gold relays) on the Octa-switch, and then designate what effects you want connected to each of 8 banks via the worlds simplest and smallest DIP switches located over top of each of the eight bank switches. Thomas chose DIP switches because they are just eight individual on-off switches in a tiny tiny package. So if your effects are plugged into Loops 1-8, you simply turn the DIP switch on for each of the effects you want in Bank 1, and then Bank 2 etc up to Bank 8. You can use one or all of the effects in each bank, and once you have designated a bank, do us both a favour and cover the DIP with a bit of tape to ensure nothing happens to the DIP switch when you are not looking, like an errant hand, or a flood of beer. The Octa-switch is mono-in and mono/stereo out, with a choice of a buffered signal or not. The unit is powered by dual 9v batteries, or a regulated power supply like the Carl Martin Big John Power Supply, and is housed in an all metal case with heart-stopping (ok, well almost) graphics. So, the same basic options found in the digitally controlled units the famous guys are using, at a fraction of the cost! Carl's head stopped hurting.
