Every box can hold any of these. Each one is its own little pedal, with its own paint, lettering, knobs and wear. Click to enlarge.

A digital effect is usually just the algorithm. Real rack gear never was. Every OCTAL box is wired like one: in through a coupling capacitor, up into an op-amp gain stage, through the effect, then out through a second op-amp, an output RC filter, and another coupling cap. That circuitry sits in the signal path whether the effect is switched in or not, because a rack unit's bypass runs through its buffers too.

The chip is a DIP-8 you can click, and it changes the character of the box:

• 741 — the 1970s chip. Slow, noisy, dark, with a little crossover grit. About −77 dB THD and −86 dBFS hiss per box.
• 4558 — the 80s rack workhorse, and the default.
• TL072 — quieter and brighter.
• NE5532 — studio-console quality: low noise and wide. About −97 dB THD and −104 dBFS hiss per box.
• WIRE — no circuitry at all. Bit-for-bit the clean digital box, so you can A/B the modern against the vintage on the same effect.

Two trimpots finish the job. DRIVE pushes the input op-amp from clean up to +18 dB, into slightly asymmetric rail clipping, and the level is made up afterwards so it changes the tone, not the volume. AGE models dried caps and tired parts: less top end, a higher low-cut, more hiss, more crossover distortion, more asymmetry, and past a third of the way, a trace of 60 Hz hum.

Component tolerances are fixed per box and per channel, so box A always sounds like box A and the two channels are never quite twins. At default settings the level stays within 0.1 dB of the bare effect, and all eight boxes of circuitry cost under 3% of a core.

A sequenced effects processor can look like a blank wall: eight empty boxes and sixteen steps. So OCTAL ships with 94 factory presets, built to show you what the machine can do and to get you thinking about what to try next.

The 53 SIGNATURE presets are Shane's own patches, built in exactly as he saved them. They come first in the list, so the arrows start there. The other 41 are hand-built across RHYTHM, SWELLS, DIRT, SPACE, ENVELOPE and LO-FI, written to do what the signature patches do: six to eight boxes in play, often the same effect twice, boxes that are off on the panel and only switched in by the steps, a different handful of boxes on each step, scene steps that move several knobs at once with the slew up so the patch leans into them, and a slow LFO for evolution alongside a short one for motion.

Don't just play them. Open one up, see which boxes fire on which steps, change a chip or a knob, and make it yours. Every preset is a lesson in how to sequence effects, and EZ will roll you a fresh chain and pattern whenever you want a surprise.