Michael's Texas Embrace

Whoa. As sort of a birthday present to myself (because I ordered it on my birthday) I got a moog ring modulator (moogerfooger mf-102). What is a ring modulator you ask? Well, let me answer not with words, but with this picture, which will tell you nothing:

See? The Gameboy is there for size reference and added sexiness. I guess if you need more info, you can get it from the sluts at wikipedia. They're giving information away left and right.

So, what does it all do? Well, it does this to my voice. Wicked. Now, you may wonder what use could that be, really, other than messin' shit up. Well, you could use it to process a disco beat made on those fantastic sounding 4-bit gameboy drums. Which is probably exactly what you were thinking.

The ring modulator has a soft side, too. It makes fantastically expressive tremelo. This would be good for your bleeding-heart types that perhaps want to make sissy music and not awful noise or 4-bit disco.

In classic analog synths ring mod was generally used to synthesize bell or gong-like sounds. Here is a square wave pattern run through it. It bongs a bit. It would bong in a nicer way if I wasn't spastically twisting knobs on it the whole time. Geez.

The unit, like modular synths, has a bunch of jacks on the back, so you can reroute its functions with cables. For instance, you could route the LFO out to another synth, or route the carrier oscilator directly into the audio input to get a sine wave. Or you can route a separate audio source in to the carrier oscillator to modulate two different audio sources. I tried modulated my guitar against the above square wave pattern, and got this. Being able to do these things makes this by far the most versatile effect I've ever got. I could modulate my voice with a synth or vice versa, etc, etc. Sweet!

Now I need to save up and buy some more of these units, a low-pass filter perhaps, and a control processor, so I can interconnect them and make crazy effects.

Also, I finished my Gameboy tune, or it's pretty much finished. I ran it through the ring mod, and it worked well. Let me know what you thing, I'm open to criticism since I'm trying new things here.

I Fall Asleep and Wake up in the Underground Forest (version 2.1)

Ummm...