User Guide

Module: Silver
129
This effect boosts the incoming level. You can adjust
the wet outgoing level separately to compensate for
this.
The effect adds additional overtones to the input
signal.
Ring modulator
This type of modulation is excellent for generating
bell-like and noisy sounds as well as for mangling
sounds with ruthless efficiency. It can also generate
subtle effects like tremolo as soft as the beating of
butterfly wings.
In ring modulation, the audio signal is "multiplied"
by a carrier wave (whose frequency can be defined
via the mod freq parameter). If you patch in an input
signal that is a single, pure sine-wave oscillation,
the frequency spectrum at the modulator’s output
would be composed of the difference between the
original signal and the carrier as well as the sum of
the two (the mirror image of the difference, so to
speak).
Example: Say we are dealing with a 300-Hz carrier
frequency and a 100-Hz audio signal. The ring
modulation generates a non-sine signal containing
the two frequencies 200 Hz and 400 Hz.
The higher the carrier frequency, the greater the
spread between output frequencies and the further
apart the outgoing notes will be.
The incoming audio signal (in our example, the 100-
Hz sine wave) is lost in the modulation, but you can
dial it back in at the effect’s output via the mix knob.
But a sound consists of an entire frequency spectrum
rather than a single oscillation, so in the real world
ring modulation generates two frequency bands
called sidebands rather than the sum and difference
frequencies. The lower sideband contains all the
difference frequencies described above, the upper
band contains the sum frequencies. Sidebands can
be added to the original signal in any desired mix.
This adds largely non-harmonic overtones to the
initial sound, which depending on effect intensity,
can sound like anything from very weird to very
dissonant.
Sound like fun? Certainly, but not half as much fun as
with a variable rather than a fixed carrier frequency,
which is why the effect offers an LFO designed to
animate the soundscape. The low-frequency LFO
oscillation (variable via the speed and depth
parameters) modulates the ring modulator’s carrier
frequency as a function of time.
Neuron.book Seite 129 Montag, 23. Dezember 2002 2:28 14