On a whim I bought the ring modulator over the weekend. It’s the craziest box I’ve ever used, slipping from beautiful sounds to sonic confusion with the tweak of a knob.
I’m a little perplexed by the box. I’ve read the manual, and researched on the website but what I can’t really understand is how I am supposed to use it in a musical context. I’ve managed to make all kinds of space noises, and made my guitar sound like a Buddhist bell when I played single C notes but what I can’t figure out is what they are generally used for.
What in short, did Mr Bob Moog (god bless him) have in mind when he built them?
Any tips and guidance would be gratefully appreciated. I am (trying to) use it with with a guitar and a Little Phatty Stage. I also have an EP2 pedal (that I was buying when I bought the modulator on the spur of the moment).
Moog makes ring modulators probably because they too appreciate that the world of sound consist of more than that which can be contained within the limited confines of the (most common) musical scale.
Ring modulation (and this pedal in particular) is a very esoteric sound effect which, in my opinion, is best appreciated when used for atonal music, sound effects etc.
you can use the LFO to modulate your signal, and not just your typical wah wah wah wah modulation sound, there are infinite ways to modulate the signal (like a few long wahs and then a series of quick wahs). If you turn the mix down to 4 and turn the freq to high and the rate pretty long it makes it sound like there are comets or whistling rockets coming off of your signal. It won’t tune to the note that you’re playing if tahts what you mean, only create a nice drone effect. Good luck, just fool around with it for a while, you’ll find cool stuff to so with it.
Because it is a simple and elegant way ro change the harmonic content of a signal. They can be used for inverse phasing of audio frequency spectrums
Read this wiki page as a start. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_modulation
That just scratches the surface of what you can do with one. (And having 2 can get really weird.)
But musically it seems to be used most as a nice tremolo or as a way to make odd order harmonics for bell like sounds.
They can do some really neat things as modulation sources if the one you have is DC coupled and can work with CV’s. (Like the one in an ARP.)
I figured out how to use it on a funk song in E. I tuned the freq. to my E note and plugged an exp pedal into mix, leaving the mix knob at 4, so sometimes it would be subtle, and other times it would be in your face.
I also thought it’d be difficult to fit a Ring Mod into playing music but the most obvious application is to use it as a tremolo. I like mine set to a dual-mode tremolo of sorts that sounds like: “wah wah - wahwahwah - wah wah”, a couple slow wahs then a few fast ones.
I use most effects subtly, not in your face & a slight detuned bell-sound of a Ring Mod fits the bill perfectly.
Besides, synth guys love the extra oscillator.
I really DO think it is the most versatile MoogerFooger & I too must recommend it be the 1st to purchase!
Tremolo, vibrato, drones, radical tone shaping, octave generation, modulation of sound with sound. Definitely the most bang for the buck moogerfooger!!
Moog stuff is not for everyone, and the Ringmod is no exception.
A lot of folks describe moog as “Its a great sound…IF thats the sound you want”
I think that if you only have a synth and the ringmod, the ringmod enables you to make your synth sound likesome of that modular music from back in the 70’s. With the mix knobs on the foogers, you can accent certain notes just with a flick of a wrist. You know how some guitarists hit a really important note in a solo and let it sustain, well you can do that with your lead but while sustaining, turn the mix on the 102 towards 10 and it really morphs your tone into some interesting tones that are similar to outerspace or whatever.
Try to run your vocals through them. COmbine them with a Phaser for outstanding sounds. THe bell and gong sounds that it produces seem to turn your tone into a new planetary system.
I love it, it was the first pedal that I got, and I bought it because the tremelo bulb in my RHodes ihas burnt out.
Its a beautiful sounding, or harsh sounding effect that has its place as an extra palette in your arsenal. It will make people who dont know about ring modulation go WTF is that? Wow! (or Ugghh) lol
It’s definitely on the non-musical side - If you get the change, there is a DVD out
of Miles Davis band at the Isle of Wight festival in 1969 - Chick Corea play a keyboard
with lot’s of ring modulation, and it sounds very crunchy and atonal.
There is also a real neat interview with Chick in 2003, where he plays a Rhodes thru
an MF-102 and talks about it a bit. Again, crunchy and rather atonal. But some neat chords.
"And then i got turned on to these little modules you could plug in and distort the sound. "
Some of my favorite ring mod stuff is the aforementioned Chick Corea stuff with Miles Davis and Jan Hammer with Mahavishnu Orchestra. It’s maybe not so atonal when applied the notes come short and fast!
It’s going to be next on my list as well. I have a Novation X-station VA synth that didn’t even have a ring mod feature built in, and I’d love to get this connected to the MF-101 I pick up this tuesday. After that It could be the MF-103, MF-105M, or the MF-107. I figured once I own a majority of the Foogers, and a CP-251, then it’s time to get a SP synth to REALLY get a moog modular sound.
I have trouble justifying a fooger RM. The ring modulation function itself has no tweakable parameters, it just multiplies 2 signals. So what you are playing with is an LFO and audio osc. IMO it’s a pretty basic LFO and oscillator - not tempco and few waveforms. I suspect that more sounds are at hand with more featured modules. I would like to see Moog release proper analog modules and let us patch them together. The 102 just seems a bit compromised by pretending to be a stomp box.
I like the 104 and 105 BTW, but the 102 design doesn’t do it for me.
Has anyone tried outing the carrier osc to the audio input? I’ll be sure to find out what happens myself on christmas, but if someone knows, please do tell!
