EKO Multitone

Until recently (when I got this here pedal, that is) I had not known that Eko have produced stompboxes. But then- why not? After all they were the ones who built the effect ladden Vox special guitars in the sixties. Of which I happened to have owned one until a month ago. The Vox played horrible but featured "tone" switches as well as a radical germanium fuzz (and a tremolo called "Repeat") all of which sounded very great.
Now the Eko Multitone features a Treble/Bass Boost switch plus a T.B.B. range pot, a Distorion switch, a "Repeat" switch with "Repeat Velocity" pot (speed), a volume pot and a wahwah switch that is next to instead of underneath the actual pedal. (Naturally I was thrilled.)
The three pots are mounted in such a manner that you can turn them by foot like with a Maestro phaser. The pedal doubles as a Volume pedal when the wah is switched off. I like the fact that there is little you can "tweak", except the really necessary. That way you focus on playing instead of fiddling with your efx knobs.
It is a little confusing, however makes sens from the internal spacing that the input is on the left hand side of the pedal.

The unit I've got was broken when I recieved it(see below), also the bottom is missing. One reason I bought it right away was the aluminum canister with "500" ink printed on top- one of the "magic" inductors of yore (there's also the "tropical fish" type of capacitors inside). Playing the wahwah was a mild disappointment however. The wah sounds very smooth and balanced and has a very long travel,yet the resonance is too low so it looses bottom end and overall bite. I hope this can be modified to yield better results.
The treble booster sounds very fine and musical, a good one.
The tremolo goes from very very slow too pretty fast and sounds nicely vintage-ish; excellent for those garage fuzz + tremolo things. It's a little annoying however that you can't set the intensity of the effect; well actually, you can: on the upper right corner of the board there are two trimmer pots. The one closer to the corner is for tremolo intensity, the other sets the distortion level. Talking of the distortion- this is the worst bit of the whole unit. It sounds not like an old Fuzz at all, probably because it uses silicium transistors. It's thin, has no character to it and seems to even weaken the signal when being switched on.
So though there are some good things in there I could not recommend it the way it is. However I do plan to replace the distorion with either a Fuzz Face or a Tonebender circiutry and get more out of the WahWah; when this is done it might become a great "the Sixties in On Box" kind of toy.

The housing is very sturdy, so are the stomp switches and the pedal construction- no scratching of the wahwah pot(hey! this thing is about 30 years old). With the unit I've got two leads were disconnected, but that could be due to the missing bottom plate. By the way: it runs on two batteries which seem to power different units, so both negative leads go to the input jack.
The weak spots are the foot operated pots; it seems hard to understand for some people that foot operated pots are by no means made to be stepped on. I have to replace all three of `em. The volume pot was so f***ed there was NOTHING getting through it at all. That plus a leaking elko and the two leads is all that was broken.
However if you use this thing with more care than the previous owner of mine did the Eko multitone should be of the more reliable variety.

Pardon?

One unit containing a Treble Booster, a fine WahWah, a nice Fuzz and a Tremolo sounds like something very desirable for me. If everything sounded nice the way it is the minimalist approach of on/off switches and just one pot (or even none) is a benefit rather than a drawback in my book (once I've found my favourite setting with a fuzz/ distortion I usually leave it at that, so...). No little patch cords, just one unit (it even came with a Vox style bag), that'd be good, wouldn't it?
As I told you already, this is not what the Eko Multitone is like the way it is; yet with a little help from my soldering iron it could turn into my wonder weapon #1. Serious WahWah afficinados who read this will know what to make of it anyway.
None-DIYers on the other hand wouldn't be overly happy with it.