Vitruvian Mod

Ring modulation is a particularly mathy effect and challenging to describe. “Multiplying two signals creating sum and difference frequencies.” tells us little musically. Often cold, dissonant and conjuring up whatever emotion it is that machines from the future feel. A rarely used effect, but you know it when you hear it. Carefully tuned ring modulator can create musical harmonic structures like Black Sabbath’s use on Paranoid. More often we hear them in science fiction films to make robots sound like evil emotionless killing machines.