“Ghostbuster Cook: The Origin of the Riddler” began with a slowly building round of soda-bottle drumming. One by one, the percussionists switched over to drum kits, taking on snares, bongos, and bass in tightly knit marching band style before unleashing a bonkers, tribal-infused downpour. It wasn’t until they dropped into a slow rumble that we realized that Deacon was still in the mix back behind his mess of gadgets and wires. Pitch-y electronic static and feedback buzzed away, and the eventual, hand-peddled MPC blips was as close as the piece got to an all-out Bromst-styled dance party before the silence returned.”

-the Village Voice

"Ghostbuster" is for Dan Deacon‘s piece “Ghostbuster Cook: The Origin of the Riddler” featuring So Percussion. Dan had done this piece a couple of times with several guitar pedals, but he wanted to minimize his setup and expand it’s functionality so he asked me to create a program that emulates his pedals and adds a few features. I proposed that we achieve similar results with a slightly different process that would require fewer parameter changes and a more elegant design.

It's designed to work with the Faderfox FX3, which is why it has been broken into 4 slots. White numbers next to knobs and buttons in the patch indicate a connection to a physical knob or fader on a particular FX3 slot. Red numbers indicate that it is necessary to hold down the shift button on the FX3 while moving a knob or pushing a button.

"Ghostbuster" takes a monophonic audio input from a microphone and runs it through an attenuator controlled by the “Gain” knob in slot 1. Whenever the resulting audio exceeds the level set by the “Thresh” knob, it triggers the ADSR in slot 3 to play, which changes the amplitude of the pitch-quantized synthesizer in slot 2. The result is that any spike in amplitude of incoming audio results in the playing of an oscillator.

The synthesizer in slot 2 has 4 waveforms (triangle, saw, square, pulse) and pitch is determined by turning the “Pitch” knob, which only changes the pitch of the oscillators when a note highlighted on the piano keyboard display is selected. That pitch can then be fine tuned up or down an octave by the “Fine” knob and can be dynamically altered by an LFO with “Speed” and “Depth” knobs. The resulting audio is run through a simple delay unit in slot 4 with “Time”, “Feed” and “Mix” knobs.

Dan can quickly save and recall preset knob positions with the FX3 buttons in slot 4, allowing him to make drastic changes instantaneously. Pressing on the Ghostbusters symbol opens a help file in order to assuage any fears that one may have of ghosts.