Poly Ring Mod

Poly Ring Mod

Overview

As was once remarked, quantity has a quality all its own; Poly Ring Mod illustrates that in a musical context, giving you access to all the ring modulators you might ever have dreamt of (our engineers clearly have some unusual nocturnal proclivities). The module is simplicity itself to use: just feed polyphonic signals into the two input jacks, and get the ring modulated result at the polyphonic output jack, for up to sixteen channels of ring modulated aural pleasure. You can toggle oversampling on on a channel-by-channel basis should your signals produce objectionable aliasing, as ring modulators are wont to do up in the rarified frequencies where the Nyquist demons dwell, or leave it off if the aliasing is at an acceptable level, or if you just like that kind of gnarl.

You can also indulge your penchant for that little extra piquancy; when the button labeled "Feedback" is enabled, the sixteen buttons immediately above it will enable feedback on a channel-by-channel basis. The grouped knob controls the amount of feedback, positive or negative, for all the channels at once.

If things start to get a bit out of control, you can enable the soft-clip button. Since the clipper itself is nonlinear, you might want to engage oversampling along with it, to keep it from aliasing. Be very careful with the feedback levels if the clipper isn't enabled, as you can get some very, very high levels, potentially crashing Voltage Modular. Finally, the overall output levels are hard-clipped to [-5.0, 5.0] to protect your hearing and equipment.

Controls

• Reflecting the basic signal flow through the module are the Input1, Input2, and Output Jacks, and their associated level knobs. The module generates the ring modulated result of the level-adjusted values from the two input jacks, and returns it via the output jack, where you can also set levels.

• The sixteen channel-numbered Feedback Buttons, the Master Feedback Button, and the feedback adjust knob allow you to feed the ring modulated output back into the input. The individual buttons toggle feedback for a single channel, while the Master Button toggles it for the entire set of channels. The Level Knob sets the amount of feedback for all channels at once. To make it easier to tweak this touchy setting the knob responds logarithmically in both directions from center, which is zero percent.

• The sixteen channel-numbered 4X buttons and the Master 4X Button toggle 4X oversampling for individual channels or all channels at once, respectively. This is a critical control, because oversampling is very CPU intensive, in this case involving potentially thirty-two Polyphase FIR upsamples and sixteen Polyphase FIR downsamples using a 127-tap LP filter. You'll discover that unless you have a very fast machine indeed, that enabling oversampling for all channels at once can bring things to enough of a crawl to cause pitch-shifting!

• The Soft-clip Button enables a soft-clip waveshaper, should you want to smooth things out. Since it is nonlinear, it can induce aliasing at sufficiently high frequencies, requiring oversampling.