Rings General
Rings can be a lot of things, but at its core it’s a modal resonator. Polyphony reduces the quality of each voice because they’re all sharing the 64 bandpass filters in the modal filter bank, so I largely don’t use it – not that we’re playing rings like a voice anyway, right? I’m not gonna explain how to use rings and access the modes, I’ll just say how I use them – you can learn more about access and controls here https://synthmodes.com/modules/rings/.
The theory of how Rings works is fairly simple: it’s a delay running at audio rate with a bank of 64 bandpass filters with adjustable cutoff, Q, and volume. Those parameters are adjusted macro-style using the controls on the panel: Frequency shifts everything up or down, brightness acts as a lowpass/highpass filter, position and shape rearrange the filters to different harmonic nodes, and damping is basically delay feedback. The controls and theory of operation are more complex than that, but for simplicity’s sake that’s what I’m going with.
One important thing to play with is what your input signal is. While you can play Rings as a voice, this article mostly covers sounds possible given a continuous audio source to the input. What that source is will alter the output sound drastically, and how long it plays will also affect how the resonator, well, resonates. I enjoy using Pico Drums, Elements’ blow noises, and Telharmonic’s 3 modes as inputs, the last two i often use as a continuous noise but i also regularly run them through a vca, lpg, or filter to create a sense of dynamics, usually with a decay EG.
Rings per mode
Modal resonator – my most-used mode of Rings, because it’s so versatile. While it’s supposed to be used as a quantised bell when used as a synth voice, it can be so much more thanks to the input, allowing you to process any audio with the modal resonator within. Feed it any percussive sound, be it from a drum sample player like Erica’s Pico Drums, a noise source through a VCA, or even another modal resonator like Elements, and it will grant you the ability to shape it as if that sound were played through solid media. Feed it a drone of noise, and it will allow auditory sculpting for wind, ocean waves crashing, fire burning, even weird sci-fi noises.
But where it can really shine is if you turn damping down to zero, at which point Rings acts more as a modal filter bank rather than a resonator. Using a simple saw wave as the input, we can get everything from phasing, vocal formants, filter sounds, and general waveshaping. All of this, depending on what you send to the input, makes Rings a venerable powerhouse of sound design tools in the right hands.
FM voice – the alt mode of the modal resonator. I don’t use this as much as the other modes purely because it’s very much internal, as in the input has no real effect on the output, at least not anymore than an envelope to damping does. Still, one should never discount the power of a simple 2-op FM voice! I just largely use other things for FM.
Sympathetic strings – This mode will pretty much always end up with a string sound underneath anything you do so it’s largely useless as a final product, but can be helpful as a semi-random modulation source. Feeding it noise gives it a rough bowed quality, and removing the noise lets a quiet string ring out. I regularly use that with a smoothed sample and hold and envelope followers to modulate other things, including other modal modules like Elements. It can also make for an excellent exciter for another modal or karplus-strong resonator, and is fun to pop into a granulator like Monsoon (Clouds variant) and see what textures you can get.
Western chords – I use this in a similar manner to the above, which makes sense given it’s the above’s alt mode. Because it generates chords and the sympathetic strings can be largely muted, however, it can be used to create complex noise from otherwise simple noise, especially when pitched down.
inharmonic string – This mode I often use as a second modal resonator mode purely because it’s got a wide variety of sounds possible from it, including alien spaceships, complex noise, plucked strings, animal glottal sounds, and even just basic filtered noise.
string + reverb – This mode I call ‘alarm mode’ because it’s really good at making a variety of ‘alarm-y’ noises. It’s basically the above mode but damping also controls a reverb. It can also make fun chorused pads and cinematic ‘epic’ sounds like for when a character is running along a roof and suddenly finds himself at the edge.
the 7th and final mode of rings, Disasterous Peace, requires a handshake to access. It’s generally an organ synth, BUT if you don’t give it v/o or triggers you can use the input as a mono in, stereo out reverb, chorus, or formant filter, each with a variation, and if you use them purely mono each output actually sounds different so you basically have 4 reverbs, choruses, and formant filters, all in one mode of one module. I mostly use the reverb and formant filter effects because, despite the barebones controls (reverb and chorus are simply mix knobs, formant filter goes through formants), they are useful tools for further sculpting a sound. The formant filter is of particular use with noise and other ambient sounds both to give them a ghostly quality, and to recreate real sounds like howling of wind through trees, and helping turn noise into walla.
Final Notes
As with any modal-based generator, there’s a ton of little ‘sweet spots’ where the resonator will match frequency with its input and amplify itself to clipping, and similarly there’s points at which it will make no noise whatsoever. It’s also incredibly easy to get ‘garbage’ sounds from it. I intentionally left out exact settings for various sounds because some sit within a careful valley that may not align exactly with your module, and others more or less exist along the full spectrum. Take what I’ve described and play with it for yourself, and if you don’t have a eurorack modular system (or other system that has had Rings ported to it), download VCV Rack with the Audible Instruments pack. It’s free, and there’s much to learn.
Taika Sound Design 
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