Chunk Systems Octavius Squeezer

This review is based on firmware revision 009. The unit's been available for a year now so I think it's fair game. OK...

First up: The manual is excellent, and necessary. Read through at least the last two sections of it with the pedal plugged in to understand what you're doing. Do that, and in a day or two you'll be setting up the sounds you want in no time.

The patch editing interface is a bit strangely organised. The list of params could be ordered better - waveform selection isn't grouped with the VCO settings, mixer settings are spread around amongst the bits they relate to (they would be better grouped), the VCA settings aren't with the mixer settings, etc. Must've made sense to somebody but in practice it could be better.

All that said, it's relatively easy to get the sound you want once you know what you're doing; a couple of minutes editing will get you "ballpark", another five or ten minutes to get the filter working just-so, and you're done. But you might find you "lose time" messing with things that aren't relevant to the task at hand just because they sound cool. :)

Live, the fact it only has two footswitches can be a pain depending on how you use it. If you want to use the tap tempo feature (for the sample & hold on the filter) or footswitchable LFO modulation, you have one footswitch left - do you want to assign it to bypass or patch increment? Y'know?

I keep mine in a true-bypass loop box so I at least don't need to use one of its two precious switches for bypass, but even then it could do with three, really (Next, Prev, tap or mod). I would rather it was a bit bigger and had three switches. It gains marks for letting you store your patches in banks, useful for live work.

So it gets a "suprisingly OK if you read the manual" mark for patch editing, and a "can be annoying" for live use. For a very complicated compact pedal I think overall they've done a good job. Let's say a 6.

It's hard to summarise the sound of this box because it does so much, but generally it works as advertised. The square/pulse and sawtooth waves are both gnarly and excellent. The fuzz (optionally gated) works well with both active and passive basses, and the filter (with LP and BP outputs) is synthy and quacky and about as configurable as a filter could be. The fact that you get envelope control over it, or triggered ADSR (a la the EHX Bass Micro Synth), plus LFO variation, plus tap-tempo sample & hold, and 50 memory slots to store your patches (plus off-pedal storage via an SD card slot).

It's easy to get gnarly filtered synth sounds out of it, that sound as good as or better than anything you could do with individual boxes (octave, filter, fuzz setups). Tracking on the VCO isn't bomb-proof by any means but it's about on a par with good analogue octavers. You do need to avoid habits like playing mute notes with the VCO enabled though - it WILL convert them to pitch and spit them out at full volume if you're using ADSR on the amplifier!

Like any tracking pedal though, with careful technique you can get good results, and it's worth the effort because the waveforms sound great. The only pedal I've used that can produce waveforms from your playing and track better is the Korg G5, but the filter on that unit is seriously flawed and there's little in the way of configuration options for the effects. This thing is the real deal. If you work with it, it sounds a hell of a lot nicer than a G5.

Issues, summarised: Using very high LFO depth settings can create noise when you're not playing, can be avoided using a low initial depth setting for the LFO. Skipping from empty memory slots to occupied ones can produce a 'pop' from the onboard mixer (easily avoided by having no empty memory slots). There could be better granularity on some of the ADSR settings, particularly attack and delay speeds - I often find the feel I want to create is somewhere between "4" and "5". Wish there was a couple of extra bits dedicated to this. Can't guarantee that this will be resolved in a future patch.

Overall I'm giving this a 9. Not perfect by any means, and for the price I can imagine some people would want perfection, but it generally sounds amazing. Hopefully it will improve as firmware revisions appear.

I had a fault with mine, seemed power-related. It would crash at random, occasionally double-click on one of the momentary footswitches, the LCD didn't update very quickly and so on. Chunk sorted it out for me but I've heard half a dozen or so other reports of faults on Squeezers, and to me that seems like a lot of faults to hear about from just a few hundred units. As such I'm not convinced that they're entirely reliable.

I suppose if you compare it to EHX reliability it actually starts to look pretty good, but still, I can't mark this up, despite the fact that I love my pedal...

As I said I had a problem with mine and had to return it to Sydney for a service. Chunk initially made a couple of suggestions which they thought might resolve it but when that didn't work they accepted it back for a service under warranty and sorted it out within a few weeks. They were polite and friendly enough, I have no complaints. I wouldn't say "I'd do it again" because I'd rather not, obviously, but yeah, could've been worse. They're a small company so if you have a problem you don't get fobbed off with support monkeys who know nothing, which is always refreshing.

If you want to make synthy noises with your bass, don't dismiss this pedal purely on price. If you wanted to buy a quality gated fuzz and a versatile filter you'd be paying nearly as much as you'd pay for the O.S. and not get the program storage, the waveforms, etc. I bought it because I really needed a programmable analogue low-pass filter, and there really aren't many choices on the market. I was pleasantly surprised to find the other features are just as good as the filter, and the unit as a whole works very well.

I'm giving it an 8 because I love the sounds, and I can cope with the analogue-quality tracking (which I've been told is being improved and will get better in future firmware updates). It loses one point for the live performance footswitching issues I mentioned above, and another point because I'm not convinced it's reliable. But frankly I don't see how I could ever replace it - and I would have to replace it - because no other pedal does this stuff.