Sometimes, you make a pedal that’s so awesome you don’t want to sell it. It happens to me a lot. And that certainly happened to the GHAST, but I didn’t end up selling it. It was a giveaway.
I wanted to make a series of fuzz pedals that all featured crystals in one way or another, since Julie owns a crystal business. For my first one, I wanted crystal knobs. This shape is not common at all, but after a lot of searching, I managed to source some labradorite stones with roughly the correct shape and size. Drilling a hole half-way into them would be another matter, a challenge for even the experienced local lapidary shop that did it.
The GHAST is also my first pedal that featured what would become my style of point-to-point wiring, which is to fit a relatively large and complex circuit into a normal 1590B enclosure. It took me around 2 hours to do, but it was well worth it, as the complexity ended up looking really awesome.
The circuit is my own, with a JFET preboost, a Darlington amplifier section, and a silicon clipping transistor. The circuit also featured a full-range tone control. And the sound… devastating.
I used an effects paint undercoat, which ended up being quite annoying to paint over, as the surface was super smooth and glossy and didn’t grip the top layers of paint very well. But it ended up looking exactly how I wanted it to, like deep, murky water.
The GHAST will forever be a pedal that I will miss. I put a lot of love into every aspect of it. But it taught me something very important, that I need to treat every pedal I make like this. Every pedal that has left my shop since has received the same amount of love, and I owe that to the GHAST.
