News · launches — By WATMM Desk —
Mulch Box is a \$175 patch bay made of nothing but jacks
Go Outside Music's first hardware, Mulch Box, is a passive, pedal-sized box of eight hardwired jack groups that works as a patch bay, a mult and a 3.5mm-to-1/4-inch adapter. It costs \$175, is made to order, and its maker is unusually honest about what passive splitting does to your signal.
Key facts
- What happened: CDM covered Mulch Box on 21 Oct 2026, the first hardware from Go Outside Music, a passive patch bay and signal multiplier the size of a guitar pedal.
- How: eight "channels", each with one 1/4-inch jack and four 3.5mm jacks wired together, no power, any signal you can send down a mono TS cable. It is \$175, made to order in batches with a 2 to 6 week wait.
- Why it matters: it turns a messy desk of pedals, synths and Eurorack into one patchable surface for little money, but splitting or combining unbuffered signals changes level and tone, and the maker says so on the product page.
Most music hardware news is about adding things: voices, screens, firmware features. Mulch Box takes nearly everything away. It is a pink box about the size of a guitar pedal, it needs no power, and its whole front is jacks. CDM's Peter Kirn wrote it up on 21 October as the first hardware from Go Outside, a small maker that until now has sold sample instruments, sample libraries and patches for the ZOIA pedal.
What is Mulch Box?
Go Outside's product page calls it a "passive mult + patch bay". Inside there are eight "channels". Each channel is one 1/4-inch jack and four 3.5mm jacks, all hardwired together. Plug something into any jack in a channel and the same signal appears on the other four.
That one idea covers three jobs:
- Patch bay. Leave your main cables plugged in, synth outputs and pedal inputs alike, and use short 3.5mm cables on the box to decide what goes where. You re-route without crawling behind the desk.
- Mult. Send one source to several places at once for parallel processing, or feed several sources into one output to combine them.
- Adapter. Because every channel mixes jack sizes, it bridges 1/4-inch gear (guitars, pedals, mixers, tape machines) with 3.5mm gear (Eurorack, small desktop synths).
The maker says it accepts "any signal type/strength" you can send down a mono TS cable. That means it is mono only: a stereo TRS or balanced line will lose a leg. Patch cables aren't included. Go Outside sells a separate cable bundle for $35.
What does it cost and when can you get one?
It is $175. Mulch Boxes are made to order in batches, and the product page warns of a 2 to 6 week turnaround and says it ships worldwide. CDM confirms the small-batch approach and the price.
The honest bit: passive splitting is not free
The most useful part of the product page isn't the feature list but the warning under it. Connect one source to one destination and the box behaves like a cable. Split or combine, and things change. Go Outside writes that splitting an unbuffered signal "divides its gain between splits (quieter)", while combining sources adds them together (louder), and that results can be "different than the sum of its parts" because gear downstream can load what is upstream.
The classic example it gives is a guitar: send a passive pickup straight into several outputs and the extra load can dull the sound, often called tone suck. The fix it suggests is a buffer, boost or tuner pedal between guitar and box. It also mentions it may release a buffer pedal of its own this winter.
Eurorack players know this already. Passive mults are standard in modular, and most module outputs are low-impedance enough to split a few ways. Mulch Box simply extends that habit to the rest of the desk.
What we think
Mulch Box is a small story, and we think it's worth a few minutes anyway, because it pushes back on how most of us buy gear.
The usual answer to a messy setup is another device with a screen: a USB audio interface with routing software, a MIDI hub, a digital mixer. Those are good tools, but they add menus, power supplies and updates to the part of the studio that should be the most boring. A box of wired jacks can't crash, needs no firmware and will work in twenty years. For artists who already own a drawer of pedals, an old four-track and one Eurorack case, the bottleneck is rarely sound. It is the five minutes of re-cabling that kills an idea before it's recorded. Making re-patching fast is a creative feature, even if it looks like plumbing.
We'd also credit Go Outside for the product page itself. Most passive mults are sold with no mention of loading. This one explains it in plain words, tells you when you'll hear it, and recommends a cheap fix. Of course, a page that hints at its own buffer pedal is also selling the next product, but the advice stands on its own. That kind of plain talk treats the buyer as a musician who'll experiment, not a customer who'll return the box.
Where we're more cautious is the price. $175 is fair for small-batch hand assembly of 40 jacks (eight channels of five), but it's a lot for a box with no active parts, and anyone with a soldering iron could wire a version for a fraction of it. CDM's Kirn says as much, hoping the box inspires readers to build their own. We agree. If you value your time, or want something that looks nice on the desk, buy it. If you're on a tight budget, the idea is free.
The bigger trend is gear that joins different worlds. Guitar pedals, desktop synths, tape and modular each grew their own cables and levels, and most people now own a bit of each. Big brands keep making those worlds more closed. Small makers like Go Outside are making them talk to each other again, often for less money. That's the same open, hackable streak we liked in Erica Synths' open-source LXR-02, and a quiet counterweight to the feature race in releases like the Roland TR-1000 1.5 update and the Arturia MiniFreak 49.
Our take: if your setup has grown faster than your patience, a passive box like this is one of the cheaper upgrades to how fast you can work. Buy it or build it, but put a buffer in front of anything that matters.