Essentially you just wire your patchbay sockets to the points where you would normally solder switches.
As an example, if you have a 30 pin sound ROM chip in a drum machine or similar, and 25 of the pins produce good effects when shorted to the other pins you could never wire up switches to cover every possible bend combination. In this case you'd want to build a 25 way patchbay with each socket wired to one of the sound ROM pins. That way you can patch the sockets together in any combination.
