Doepfer A-114 5-stars Reviews

You can never have enough VCAs, Ring Mods are the best VCA ever!

Yes, a ring modulator is a kind of VCA. just use an envelope. They’re great for amplitude modulation. My favorite use is waveshaping CV, mixing envelopes or mixing LFOs. Use both halves. Experiment. Have fun!

Dalek to Zappa, Radio to Gong

The ring modulator has been used by many artists including Frank Zappa on his voice and John McLaughlin. on his guitar.

It can create anything from a Dalek voice to gong or radio sounds.

For a primitive vocoder put a microphone into one of the inputs and a a low pitched oscillator into the the other and the multiplied signal from the output to your mixer.

To make gong or bell sounds try saw / sine or a square / sine combination on the inputs and have one an octave higher than the other. Though always experiment these are only suggestions.

Does what it says on the tin

It's not flashy, it's not beautiful - but is, as is usual for doepfer, a robust good quality build and darned useful little module. Clean sound, no bells and whistles - unless you are making bell and whistle sounds of course, in which case it excels XD

Ideas for uses;

The obvious scifi sounds, feed it detuned or pitch modulated sine oscs and lots of reverb (maybe a199 spring verb).

Split an osc signal with a mult and waveshape and frequency shift one copy and ringmod the two together (beefy sounds here!).

Drone central

Great little module, Great for rotating pads or drone sounds, 2 triangle oscillators plugged into this, slight offset gives a great pumping sound drone. Module is a real simple setup but produces some great results.