When I bought Ribbons and Sparks, I read the manuals and, particularly with Sparks, thought, “this is a complicated pedal.” But then I was surprised to find I could pick both up pretty darn immediately and they’ve become huge mainstays for me. I’ve had the opposite experience with Ghosts, which appears very simple but… I am having a really hard time getting the sounds I want out of it? I’ve seen demos with really great sounds, but I feel like I’m not doing something right and what I’m getting is often either muddy or thin and indistinct. I’d love to hear tips from people who have mastered this one, particularly about decay times and mix. I will say that, being primarily a synth player, I’m maybe realizing that synth is not the right application for it (since synths have a lot of resonance control already) and I’m guessing it’ll shine much more on guitar, vox, and drums.
yea synths might not be the best instrument for playing Ghosts as a resonator, unless you’re playing very plucky synth lines or more atonal textural stuff (like actual noise). Ghosts provides harmonic density: if the source material is very rich or has a long decay, it gets muddy fast.
I think about Ghosts as an actual synth and as a vocoder for material that isn’t primarily tonal.
I mostly use it as a microtonal synth: I find the air exciter a little inflexible but different enough from the pluck/strike exciter to make some really interesting ambient textures in conjunction with the plucked stuff. Getting into the microtonal/just intonation world is a really fun rabbit hole with it. I’m sure Jaak is inundated with keeping up with stock, but there is apparently velocity already in the coding: it just needs to be turned on as a possible midi command. I imagine that more additions will be made to its synth abilities.
Also, I love feeding it straight noise from my Roger That! This is actually my favorite usage, making atonal material tonal. I think the piezo touch pad is fun as well.
Regarding the actual tone, when I play it as a synth, I almost always keep the tone below noon and I play pipes and bars mostly. This sound is surprisingly thick. For me, the high tone settings also sound thin.
I say just try random things. It’s very flexible but there are also clear rules with how to play with it that kind of can’t be crossed.
I found myself using Ghosts primarily… as a synth itself). I’ve had most fun using it with a sequencer or a MIDI keyboard, when resonnators are excited with MIDI notes.
It produces a much more predictable and “clean” sound. I realize it’s a bit of a “shortcut” in that I am not using probably the most unique feature of Ghosts - its ability to process the incoming audio signal and excite the resonnators by the harmonic content of it, which is a much more delicate task and requires much steeper learning curve.
I also agree that it can sound incredible with vocals. I’ve had great fun running vocal recordings via Ghosts, you can get some really otherworldy sounds )
I got mine yesterday and have only tried it on Reface CP electric piano and a mic’d upright felt piano, both accompanied by some Volca drum synths mixed in before hitting Ghosts input. I got some really great results with these sources, but it’s true that the you need to find sweet spots in all the unruliness of the pedal’s full range of settings. The terrazzo touch effect is so cool as a granular algorithm that the whole pedal seems worth it to me just for that, it manages to capture a different feel (strum like?) from other granular effects I’ve tried. The Shepard Shifter is awesome too, reminds me of a barber pole flanger but less spacey sounding. I’m looking forward to coming up with some workflow to sequence the root/chord/voicing knobs, some custom Zoia patch could work great for this and I think a single TRS cable is all that’s needed to connect the two
I’m working on a video where I try to experiment with this, with audio examples, but two ideas that made it easier for me:
- Use a single tone (not a chord) as an inverted pedal point i.e. pick a tone that sounds good in your key (like the 3rd or 5th scale degree, so, like e in C Major). This creates what I think of as a characteristic “ghost” sound where some chords will resonate and some won’t and it’s like there’s somebody else in the room responding with one-note answers to some things that you play. Sounds especially great w delay after it.
2: If you do want to use a chord, don’t use the tonic chord of the key you’re playing in. Remember it only resonates when you play a tone that’s in its chord, and you can exploit that. For example, if you set it to an E Major chord when you are playing in C, then your C chords start to get a Cmaj7 flavor, you have the option of playing going F-Fm-C and that enharmonic Ab gets pinged, etc etc but it doesn’t sound bad because it doesn’t resonate tones that you don’t play.