Ghosts

A texture effect that captures slices of whatever you feed it and loops them back as a drifting cloud of "ghosts." It holds onto the rhythmic motion of your signal and keeps it breathing — even after the input falls silent.

How it works

Ghosts continuously records the incoming stereo audio into a rolling ~5.5-second buffer. On a tempo grid, it spawns looping captures: each ghost grabs the most recent slice of history and replays it through its own fade-in/fade-out, up to eight overlapping at once. As fresh ghosts rise, the oldest fade back out, so the cloud is always shifting. With several voices layered, the result is an evolving pad stitched from echoes of your input.

Controls

  • Captr — how often a new ghost is born, stepped across 24 tempo divisions from 8 down to 0.125 quarter-notes. Turn it up for faster spawning and a busier, denser cloud.
  • Len — the length of each captured slice, stepped from 0.125 up to 8 quarter-notes. Shorter slices stutter and granularize; longer ones sustain into smeared pads.
  • Voices — caps how many ghosts can sound at once, stepped from 1 to 64. Turn it down to thin the cloud to a lone drifting voice; push past the classic 8 toward 64 for a genuine granular mass. It's the density axis that Captr and Len can't reach on their own. The cloud is equal-power normalized, so more voices means a denser texture at the same overall level — not a louder one.
  • Smooth — the fade time shaping each ghost's grain envelope, from 5 ms to 500 ms. Short fades snap the loops in for a crisp, rhythmic edge; long fades swell them into smooth, pad-like washes.
  • Mix — dry/wet blend, from the untouched input to fully ghosted.
  • Rate — divides the tempo-locked spawn interval, ×1 to ×16. At ×1 ghosts arrive on the Captr grid; crank it and they arrive up to sixteen times faster — still in sync, but at granular-cloud density.
  • Jitter — sprays each new ghost's capture point back into the ~5.5-second history buffer. At 0 every ghost grabs the most recent slice (the classic behavior); turn it up and the cloud draws from everywhere you've played recently — scattered, decorrelated, granular.
  • Pitch± — per-ghost playback-rate spray, up to an octave in either direction at full. Each ghost picks its own rate when it spawns and keeps it for life, so the cloud shimmers with detuned and octave-shifted copies.
  • Clock — where the tempo comes from. Ext measures the pulses arriving at the clock input, which is how this module has always worked. Song follows the timeline's tempo directly, with no cable at all. Int runs at its own speed, set by the BPM field beside it. One thing worth knowing: in Ext the divisions are relative to whatever you clock it with, so feeding it sixteenths makes every label four times faster than it reads. In Int and Song the module knows what a quarter note is, so the labels mean exactly what they say.
  • BPM — the tempo for Int. In Song it greys out and shows you the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it greys out too, because the cable is in charge.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the stereo signal to capture; each channel keeps its own history.
  • Captr / Len / Voices / Smooth / Mix / Jitter / Rate / Pitch± CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope to let the cloud's density, scatter, and shimmer drift on their own for evolving textures.
  • Clock — tempo reference while the Clock control is on Ext; the spawn and length grids lock to its quarter-note period. Unpatched, it sits at 120 BPM.
  • Reset — a trigger here forces a fresh ghost to spawn immediately.
  • Out L / Out R — the dry/wet stereo result.

Tips

  • Feed it a rhythmic loop, then mute the source: Ghosts will keep the groove alive as a ghostly, decaying echo of itself.
  • Short Len with fast Captr turns any input into a granular shimmer; long Len with slow Captr builds slow, overlapping drones.
  • Patch the same clock that drives your sequencer so the cloud pulses in time with the rest of your patch.