RM-1A:

Ring Modulator - Design by Blacet Labs (Klangwerks)

Many moons ago, John Blacet offered a few of his circuit boards without components or faceplates for a very low price. I grabbed one of his Klangwerks PCBs, and built my own faceplate from a blank FracRak. It's a classic ring modulator with a built-in carrier generator. It sounds great, and is by far my favorite ring modulator out of anything I've ever tried.

I had some assembly difficulty with this module: I chose to use 1/4" jacks (Blacet uses 1/8") which unfortunately causes some clearance problems with the rack rails. For this reason, the RM-1A can only be used in my Paia cabinets, not the Blacet cabinets (Blacet uses thicker front angles which rub on the bottom-most jack). Additionally, the Paia panels are thicker than Blacet's, so I couldn't get the mounting nuts to fit on the PCB-mounted pots. The pots usually hold the PCB in place, so I needed to drill some holes in the circuit board and use L-brackets for holding it together. Obviously these problems aren't any fault of Blacet Labs... but I figured I should mention them in case anyone else decides to try 1/4" jacks on a Blacet design.

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RM-2A:

Ring Modulator - AD633 scratch built

The design for this simple ring modulator came straight from an Analog Devices application note. The module has 3 jacks and no knobs: X input, Y input and ring modulator output. In hindsight I should have added some gain / attenuation at the inputs, but otherwise it still works fine. This poor guy doesn't get much use, however. RM-1A (Klangwerks) is so much more convenient and flexible that RM-2A hardly sees any use.

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DIST-1A:

ProCo Rat mounted in FracRak

I admit it: I cheated on this one. I had a ProCo Rat distortion pedal that I used with my modular synth far more often than with my guitar. For this reason, I chose to put it behind a FracRak panel and save myself some desk space (and 9V batteries).

The ProCo Rat is a diode clipping distortion that is quite popular among guitarists. It has a fairly good tone, and exhibits some "sag" like a tube amp when driven extremely hard. I happen to have a decent tube amp, and I prefered my amp's tube distortion over the Rat... so it became a synth module.