Little black boxes such as the OTO multi-FX box tend to have an alluring mystique about them, which gets heads turning and makes ears tingle. Especially when they’re elegantly designed and offset with bold lighting and minimalist graphics.

Despite its deceptively clean exterior, the Biscuit’s insides are designed to degrade your squeaky clean audio using an array of lo-fi processing, including 8-bit converters, clock rate reduction, digital effects and stereo analogue filters.

In detail

The first three dials on the top row are labelled Drive, Naked and Dressed. While the former is self explanatory, the latter two set the volume levels of the dry and 8-Bit effect signals.

In practice, the Drive knob needs to be turned a few degrees before you can hear the effect – even if the Dressed knob is on full. The drive stage provides analogue saturation via diode clipping, so you can dial up some gentle warmth or ramp it up a bit for some extra crunch and fizz. Either way, the drive stage boosts the effect level so it can become way louder than the dry or bypass levels if desired.

When you hit the Bypass button, its green light goes dim and the whole circuit is bypassed. In this mode, the volume is fixed and the Naked dial has no effect on the dry signal.

The first-stage of signal processing are the 8-bit converters. The conversion adds a bit of background noise to everything passing through the box, and is what you’d expect. Next port of call is the effects section, which gives you a choice of four effects: waveshaper, pitch-shifter, delay and step filter.

The filter has been specially tweaked to complement the bitcrusher effect. In contrast to the wave smashing, the filter just oozes creamy goodness. The tri-colour Filter button toggles between low-, high- and band-pass types, and there are knobs for cutoff and Q.

As a bonus, there’s a nice little eight-step sequencer that can control cutoff too. You can change the number of steps as well as the speed and there are three playback modes – forward, alternate and random. The step filter leads to some old-school fun, but it’s not possible to manually sweep the cutoff with it running.

Only one effect can be used at the time; turn it on by pressing the Brain button, and program using the bottom row of buttons. It takes a little bit of memorising to remember what button controls what function at any different time, but the lights give a bit of visual feedback which helps keep track of things.

The waveshaper is our favourite, and things can get pretty crunchy and edgy which this is engaged. The digital delay can be set manually or synced to MIDI clock, and you can tweak the feedback time and tempo using the Clock Rate knob. We’re not sure how useful it is, as it omits the original signal and there is no wet/dry mix. The pitch shifter spans one octave up and two down, but lags behind by a few milliseconds so drum loops will lose timing. It does work really nicely on silky strings to add extra harmonies via the 3rd, 5th and octave settings.

Many of the effect parameters can be edited using the Clock Rate knob. Because of this assignment, you can’t change the clock rate until you deselect the effects altogether.

(2 pages; go to page: 2)

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OTO Biscuit