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The Olympic Ring Modulation Tutorial

July 27, 2012 / 7 Comments

There’s nothing like a terrible pun to start a weekend… or indeed a major international sporting event. This week we’re breaking ring modulation down to brass tacks!

Ring modulation is a fairly misunderstood effect; at its heart it’s an amp modulator that takes an external carrier signal, mixes it with an internally generated modulator signal in two different ways, and then outputs the results. I had a good think about a really simple way to help you get your head around it, and fingers crossed it’ll make things clear!

Ring Modulation Tutorial

As well as this ring modulation tutorial our premium courses are just about to start flowing out of the gates so you’ll be able to get real, useful, and understandable tutoring around an entire studio at a best-at-any-price, er, price, but we still want to do as much as we can for free (I just need to pay the bills so things can keep happening)! Let us know your thoughts and we hope you’ll be on board to support the cause when our courses start to drop!

Oh, and enjoy the olympics!

 

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Posted in: Video Tutorials
  • http://www.facebook.com/chrispop.christianbeermann Chrispop Christian Beermann

    interesting one! never thought about playing with ringmodulators. now i just spent 2 hours messing round with one and different sources (vocals, drumloops syths etc). not that i got anything useful out of it yet, but it sure is fun :)

  • robert wilson

    Can you use a ring modulator to emulate a Vocoder? great video BTW

    • http://www.ohdratdigital.com Chris

      Good question! You can get a somewhat similar effect, but a vocoder works in a very different way. Hm… another tutorial perhaps?! For now, vocoders split a vocal frequency into a number of bands which are then ‘transcoded’ into synthesised frequencies. The reason ring mod can sound similar is because it highlights harmonics you wouldn’t normally hear in speech… make sense? Sort of?!

      • http://www.ohdratdigital.com Chris

        I should say ‘split a vocal frequency range into a number of frequency bands’ for more accuracy really!

        • robert wilson

          Thanks, a tutorial would be cool, I must say I was disappointed you didnt end the Ring modulator video by saying exterminate through the actual filter :(

          • http://www.ohdratdigital.com Chris

            Ah now that WOULD have been funny!

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