Softube Mutable Instruments Rings - Electronic Delivery

Excite a material with some sort of energy input (a slap, a rub, a blow) and you’ll get a noise. The resonant qualities of that material (be it wood, metal, glass; a drum, a trumpet, a buttock), and the way in which you excite it, will determine the qualities of that sound; amongst other things, its timbre, frequency, and length in time. It is this thrilling world of excitation and resonance that concerns the Rings module, originally from Mutable Instruments, and now available as the Softube Mutable Instruments Rings for Modular.

A physical modeling phenomenon

Rings uses tuned filters to physically model just about any resonant material imaginable, in three broad categories.

The ‘modal’ resonator emulates the resonant qualities of plates, strings, membranes, and tubes, which reinforce energy fed into them by organizing certain frequencies of sound around certain physical points (called modes) based on their size, shape, and structure.

The ‘sympathetic strings’ model offers the kinds of droning and over-toning sounds and textures offered by instruments such as the sitar. Virtual strings other than the one ‘plucked’ ring in sympathy with the main note.

The ‘modulated/inharmonic string’ model is an extension of Karplus-Strong synthesis, which uses a delay with very high feedback and very short period to synthesize a pitched wave like a string being struck, bowed, or plucked.

In addition to these fascinating and endlessly explorable varieties, Rings offers timbral control of the resulting sound, as well as the ability to excite the resonator models in any way you choose in the first place, either with an internally generated noise burst or with your own external audio signals.

You can even play strummed chords with Rings, due to a built-in polyphony mechanism which generates a new virtual string (up to 4 in total) for every trigger – even while the last note is still ringing.

The range of noises this module is capable of creating is simply staggering, and the joy of feeding different things into it never ends. Grab yours today, and run rings around the sounds you made yesterday!