by le lambin » Fri Apr 05, 2024 7:21 pm
I recently had the pleasure of playing two new to me ring modulators- the Adventure Audio Outer Rings and Pladask Elektrisk Feber- and comparing them to my trusty MF-102. Here are my thoughts:
First, to anyone who has not played a MF-102, it’s my favorite ring mod forever. It’s my baseline because I know it intimately, and because it has a beautiful, clean, 3 dimensional sound that I have yet to experience elsewhere.
Feber: This thing sounds fantastic and has many controls that interact beautifully with eachother. I’ve only played one other Pladask pedal, Taken, but the Feber shares a similar attention to detail in terms of circuit design. Nearly every setting sounds very musical and fun to play- a lot of love went into making this thing, and it shows.
I love the low/high band knob- it isolates some frequency bands that sound very bouncy and resonant, particularly on the low band side. The ability to get some phase-y sounds is cool. The feedback control is very interesting and fun to use. The S+H modulation is cool at slow settings. At fast settings it sounds like every other S+H out there.
I think the MF-102 sounds better, but the Feber still has a very good, tamed core ring mod sound, and it’s a lot smaller and has some unique features. The experience of playing it is pleasant -the controls have range but are easy to understand, and most importantly, fun to play with. I really need to play more Pladask stuff.
Outer Rings: maybe the complete opposite of Feber. Noisy, distorted, dissonant. Even at “clean” settings this thing is intentionally harsh sounding. Its core tone reminds me a lot of the DBA Space Ring- I’ve never played an original but own a Deadend FX copy, and it has a similar noisy, atonal wild character. The Space Ring is a ring modulator modulating a ring modulator- the Outer Rings similarly has some kind of modulation controlling the carrier frequency (and maybe other stuff- it’s hard to tell by listening!)
What sets the Outer Rings apart from the Space Ring is its depth of modulation options. The two switches labeled “outer” and “rings” change the modulation speed- it sounds to me like one changes the carrier range, and the other changes the modulation range. I found it best to just flip the toggles hither and thither until I found something cool- the overall sound is so chaotic it’s hard to be intentional with the controls.
Finally, there is a feedback footswitch which produces, in my opinion, the coolest results. All kinds of weird pulses and shrieks you would expect from a feedback loop are here, and it interacts beautifully with incoming signals.
I’m not even going to compare it to the MF-102- the design intent on the Outer Rings is too far removed from the MF-102.
I’m definitely not a noise musician- I usually don’t like this kind of sound, but there is something magical about running a vanilla drum machine into the Outer Rings and turning the feedback on, and twiddling knobs. So many really cool interactions with the feedback- this is this pedal’s strength, and what sets it apart from other ring mods I’ve tried.
