Ghost Note Audio Swirls Chorus Pitch Shifter Compressor

Lush, warm, tone-altering modulation can add the spark and sparkle your tone needed, in many different and creative ways, and a good compressor will round out your sound. When you get a pedal that has both of these, and runs in a wide stereo field, you can bet that it’s gonna be a special piece of gear. Which is what you have with today’s unit, the Ghost Note Audio Swirls Chorus Pitch Shifter Compressor. This thing has so many features and can add so much to your rig, we better get at exploring it and see all it can do…

Swirls consists of three effects; a Tri-Stereo Chorus emulation, a micro pitch-shifter effect and an aggressive, VCA-style compressor. This particular stack of effects has become rather famous, and probably best known from Michael Landau’s seminal album, Tales from the Bulge. In the 80s, big racks were all the rage, and guitarists would frequently stack effects in parallel to add more “thickness” to their sound. But this usually required multiple rack units and complex wiring systems to accomplish, with the end result being the size of an average fridge. Swirls intends to give you the distilled essence of this specific sound, without the need for a loading dolly to transport all your gear.

The chorus is a fairly accurate emulation of the Dyno-my-piano Tri-Stereo chorus, but we tuned it against a Fulltone TERC unit, which is a more modern, but fully analog and authentic recreation of the original design.

The pitch shifter is based on the classic synchronous overlap-add methodology, used in units from Eventide, Digitech and many others, who have offered similar effect in the past. It produces a thick, chorus-like sound, but without the movement of a traditional chorus, caused by the low frequency oscillators used to modulate the signal in a chorus unit.

Finally, we have the compressor. It’s a very fast and aggressive, feed-forward, RMS-detection design, loosely based on the dbx 160x. the compressor sits in front of the chorus and pitch shifter, and adds that signature “pop” to the sound, especially noticeable when playing a Strat in the second position. All of the parameters present in these three effects can be controlled externally via Expression or MIDI, and while you can run Swirls in mono, the stereo spread here is why you buy pedals like this in the first place. You can also connect this pedal to your computer and utilize Ghost Note’s Web-Based Editor, to control real-time parameters, perform firmware updates, swap out different effects and more.

The mix of these three effects is an obvious selling point to the Swirls Chorus Pitch Shifter Compressor, but once you start playing around and mixing up the parameters, you’ll see how seamlessly they all blend with one another. You can add just a hint of effect and tonal restructuring to your rig, or go balls-out and make out-of-this-world sonic creations – the choice is solely up to you. Really rad to check out our first Ghost Note Audio effect – can’t wait to bring you all more gear from these giuys. Be sure to check out their website, and don’t sleep on our lengthy demo, where we dive into all that’s possible with Swirls…cheers!!