Endorphin.es Ghost: What is it?
There is an abundance of multi-effects processors on the market, with options covering all levels of budget and feature set, as well as quality. What is harder than ever is sifting through the masses to find something that works well, is of good value and has a little personality, seeing as so many options tend toward the sterile.
Endorphin.es has teamed up with musician/producer and YouTube superstar Andrew Huang to develop a number of tools, including Ghost, which we are looking at here.
Ghost comes as a 1hp module but is also, along with other members of the lineup, available as a stompbox-style guitar pedal. We will stick with the Eurorack version for this review.
Options are available for a silver face plate or a classy gold on black, making it easy to suit your rig, should that matter to you.
Endorphin.es Ghost: Performance and verdict
Ghost offers quite the range of features, from drives and filters to delays and reverbs and, while not the smallest module, it is compact but somehow doesn’t feel cluttered. Some controls have a secondary use but these are very well labelled and all use the Routing button as a shift key.
So what about those effects, then? Well, let’s start off with tone shaping. There is input and output gain, giving different flavours of drive to the actual distortion effect, which is more of a saturated and warm effect, all easily controlled by the rotary knobs, all of which feel wonderful in use, with just the right amount of resistance.
That large central knob is for one of the filters, which goes from low-pass to high-pass, with manual and CV control of resonance and cutoff. Other options for filtering are bandpass and comb, so there is plenty of scope for dialling in an interesting tone.
Moving on to the reverb there is an awful lot to like here. You can dial in predelay, mix, amount and tail, as well as change the signal path. The reverb can be short and subtle, right through to epic and spacey.
It’s a very similar story with the delay too, which has manual and CV control for clock division and tap tempo. It’s a pretty comprehensive delay for one with so few options and you can coax all manner of delays out of it.
Where the Ghost really shines is in how all these different elements interact. The routing button can be used to tap through a number of routing options, so you can place things like time-based effects in front of the compressor, or put the filter before or after time-based.
This, along with the personality of the module, makes for a really satisfying experience. On top of that, it is very playable. All controls fall to hand where you’d expect, there’s plenty of manual control and even secondary controls don’t take much button gymnastics.
All in all, you could lose serious amounts of time with Ghost, bending all kinds of sound sources to your will, from the most delicate and articulate to the grungiest drone.
MusicRadar verdict: A belter of a multi-effects module, with all the right options in the right places. It’s worth the asking price for half of what is on board.
Endorphin.es Ghost: The web says
"Ghost stands out for its combination of dynamic, spatial, time, and distortion effects plus an easy-access filter. It’s a greatest-hits-plus of endorphin.es’ modules packed into 16HP."
CDM
Endorphin.es Ghost: Hands-on demos
Endorphin.es
Andrew Huang
SON WU
Endorphin.es Ghost: Specifications
- KEY FEATURES: Multi effect including delay and reverb, Stereo module, Multiple distortions, Multiple filter options.
- CONTACT: Endorphin.es
