harmonic ringmodulator sounds?

[TELEFUNKON]

How do I get those metallic RM (not: Roger Mayer) sounds
without going disharmonic on chords
and losing the original pitch?

[Meanderthal]

 Build a really really fast tremolo like the Hysterysis oscillator.

[TELEFUNKON]

no problems with modulation frequency bleedthrough?

[Elektrojänis]

I think the modulation frequencies have to be selected for the chords. Check out the setup video for zvex ringtone at the zvex site to hear what I mean.

Another thing that sounds a bit similar is some of the full wave rectification based octavers (or octave fuzzes) when you play chords through them. It only works with some chords ore some voicings of the chords though.

[Mark Hammer]

1) Ring modulators, as musical devices, were the product of the emergence of electronic music, generally produced with single or synced oscillators in monophonic manner.  So, they were never designed in anticipation of more than one note at a time, and were generally used to treat fairly simple and steady-state (i.e., unchanging) waveforms.  If you want RM on chords, you will need to go hexaphonic.  No easy way around that requirement.

2) Generally speaking, you get a more "pitched" quality to ring modulation when the modulating frequency is lower, and preferably just inside the boundaries of what we call "audio frequencies".  If I modulate a 400hz note with a 150hz oscillator, I'll get a 250hz and 550hz difference/sum; not a particularly  "melodic" or harmonious outcome, and not at all representative of roughly where I am in the scale.  If I modulate 400hz, instead, with 40hz., then I get 360hz and 44hz.  So, I'm somewhere in the ballpark of knowing what the original note was, although I still get that "rubber band" quality.  I mention this because even if you had six completely parallel and independent ring modulators, chords would not be discernible as chords unless the modulating frequency let you have at least SOME sense of the relationship between notes.  Otherwise its just chaos, and nothing is really gained by use of independent RM.

3) "Perfect" ring modulation tracks the actual pitch of the note and adjusts the modulating frequency proportional to that pitch to provide a roughly equivalent sum/difference "space".  The pitch blurriness created by a sum/difference addition to 400hz in our example (440hz/360hz) is greater than the degree of blurriness produced if the note was much higher and modulated by the same frequency (e.g., 960hz and 1040hz sideband products of modulating 1000hz with 40hz).  Playing individual notes with the same constant modulating frequency can be loads of fun if the "error" produced by the sidebands varies as a function of the notes selected.  But if you want to hear a chord as something sortalike a chord, you'd need to introduce the same degree of proportional error in each note for a particular note relationship to be heard as that relationship.

) Many ring modulators can vary with respect to how much original signal is heard in relation to the sideband products.  I suspect anything intended to let chords be *heard* as chords would need to situate the ring modulated sideband products more int he background and let the original note come into the foreground.

[slacker]

Try JC's Nyquist Aliaser that does very cool ringmod sounds. Apparantly it lets through more of the fundamental than real ringmods so it sounds "more musical". I've built it recently and you do get the ringmod effect but you can still hear the notes you're actually playing and chords still sound good.
It's basically a very fast tremolo but the design means you can tune out most if not all of the bleedthrough.

[Meanderthal]

 

no problems with modulation frequency bleedthrough?

Depends what ya mean by problems... it's more like an overtone, and of course, it's tunable. But, it'll be much less sour than a ring modulator.

You could also use a digital sampler and play your sampled ring modulated sound on keyboard.

Keep in mind that a ring modulator by its very nature produces mathematically related sounds rather than harmonically related, so the terms 'harmonic' and 'ring modulator' don't really go together very well at all...

[Cliff Schecht]

I have a ring modulator that I designed to go along with a Digitech Whammy in such a way that you can blend the original signal in with whatever the output of the Whammy is. It's great for weird effects or for getting octave type fuzz, plus it makes the harmonizer sound even cooler.

[jonathan perez]

I have a ring modulator that I designed to go along with a Digitech Whammy in such a way that you can blend the original signal in with whatever the output of the Whammy is. It's great for weird effects or for getting octave type fuzz, plus it makes the harmonizer sound even cooler.

any chorus effect BEFORE the whammys input, with any harmony set, SOUNDS AWESOME!

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

On my commercial Frostwave "Blue Ringer" ring modulator, I have a wet/dry blend control. Often a user just adds a little bit of the non-harmonic (well, odds are they are non-harmonic!) rig modulation products to the original to get a metallic 'edge'. Having a blend control changes a ring modulator from a one-trick pony to a workhorse.