PRODUCT REVIEW
Ring Thing
ELECTRO-HARMONIX
BY LYLE ZAEHRINGER
The early 1960s saw the ring modulator’s
first major appearances in the world of
music. Pioneer synth builder Don Buchla
incorporated a simple ring-mod circuit into
his Buchla 100 Modular Synthesizer in 1963.
Around the same time, revolutionary electro-composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was scoring
music that often called for numerous ring
mods to work in tandem with live musicians.
But what does all this mean for guitarists? As
with every other invention of sound design,
guitarists have absorbed it, corrupted it, and
made it a thing of their own.
You may recall Electro-Harmonix’s 1978
release of a basic ring modulator pedal
dubbed the Frequency Analyzer. Building
on the success of that pedal, EHX recently
released the ultra-versatile Ring Thing. Like
the Analyzer, it’s a ring mod, but it’s also
a pitch shifter, a tremolo, a rotary-speaker
emulator, and many other things that can’t
be easily classified. And with it, EHX challenges guitarists and electronic music purists
alike by cramming so many features into one
pedal that you might never have the time
to discover them all. The Ring Thing is the
most versatile, cutting-edge ring modulation
stompbox on the market. Yet even a beginner can bypass the manual and instantly blast
off into their own warbling space-time warp.
four main settings—ring modulator, upper
sideband modulator, lower sideband modulator, and pitch shift. The pedal features
stereo outputs so that, in upper and lower
sideband modes, you can send each sideband to a separate output. Features-wise,
my only confusion arose from the fact that
the square, sine, and triangle waveforms
are the only ones marked around the
Wave knob. Two ramp waves are situated
between the sine and triangle waves, but
they’re not labeled. A meager complaint,
I’ll admit.
strokes of weird harmony to mammoth bells
that chime and swell.
With This Ring, I Thee Wed
At first glance, I knew the Ring Thing was
a quality product, because it boasts the
characteristic rugged casing, comfortable
knobs, true bypass switching, and high-
quality jacks and footswitches. And one
glance at the knobs across the top tells
of the versatility that lies within. From left
to right, we have Blend (wet/dry), Wave
(square, sine, ramp up/down, triangle),
Filter/Rate, Fine/Depth, Coarse, and Mode.
The Ring Thing allows you to store and
recall up to nine presets, all hands-free. The
Mode knob selects between the pedal’s
For me, the Ring Thing’s most indispensable
feature is the Blend knob, because generally
ring modulation devices produce unpredict-
able, atonal textures that tend to alienate
the average guitarist. But who really wants to
be the average guitarist? The trick is to mod-
ulate a percentage of your sound. It’s this
mingling of processed and unprocessed sig-
nal that produces tones ranging from subtle
The most difficult application of ring modula-
tion has always been on the stage. But EHX
has stepped up to the task by including an
automatic tuning function, accessible via
footswitch, that sets the pitch of the ring
mod’s carrier wave to your instrument’s
pitch. With this function, you can use the
heavily modulated effects of a ring mod
without sacrificing the ability to create emo-
tive and discernable melodies. Less than
a second after stepping on the Preset/
Tune footswitch, the Ring Thing has already
detected your pitch and set the carrier wave
accordingly. And get this—if you hold down
the footswitch the Ring Thing will track your
pitch as you change notes, constantly reset-
ting the carrier wave. This produces some
spectacular digital artifacts that make the
pedal even better suited for performance
and improvisation.
