'Elemental Ring' Empress ZOIA patch [MIDI controlled resonator inspired by Mutable Rings & Elements]

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Hello friends, I present to you Elemental Ring -- my ZOIA-fied take on the underlying concept behind the Mutable Instruments Eurorack modules Elements and Rings. It works great for physical modelling sounds like, plucks, bells, strings, percussion and more - the sound design possibilities are vast.

At its core It’s a 4-voice polyphonic* resonator with inbuilt exciter that functions both as a standalone MIDI controlled instrument, and a stereo audio effects processor. Each voice consists of 3 resonating tuned bandpass filters (12 in total), filter a is panned centre, b and c stronger left and right to create a stereo image.

Like Mutable Instruments Elements, it features an exciter section. This is what you use to pluck/strum/crash/blow the resonating filters to generate sound. The resulting sound of resonating filters depends highly on what audio you hit them with, but non-melodic audio (aka noise) tends to work best due to its broad spectrum.

The exciter section consists of white noise running thru an Aliaser module, into a band pass filter. The output of the exciter has an ADSR envelope and VCA for each of the 4 voices. With the noise unaffected by the Aliaser, a smooth pure sound is possible. As the Aliaser degrades the signal, more textured sounds are available, at its lowest settings, it results in fast percussive pings and dings that sound very granular. With the ADSR settings, we can morph the exciter signal from percussive plucks, right through to beautiful long textured pads. The filter cutoff and resonance provide further sculpting capabilities.

MI’s Elements module is monophonic, but I’ve taken cues from the MI’s later module, the extremely popular Rings, and made this have a kind of polyphony that really takes the sounds possible to another level..The best of both designs.

*To be clear, this is not a truly polyphonic design -- you cannot play chords. However new notes will ring over the top of the previous ones, much like MI’s RIngs. So if you have a long decay and high resonance settings, you can hit up to 4 notes in quick succession and a chord will sound.

MI’s Elements features 64 bandpass filters -- not something we can do on ZOIA so the sounds are ultimately not as complex, but I’ve included my own twist with the 4 x banks of 3 -- individual control over tuning of each bank of 4 filters a, b and c. This gives you some really fun and quick ways to completely change your sound -- from perfectly tuned notes, to harmonious chords to dissonant percussion.

The beauty of resonator designs is that you can also use your own audio at the exciter -- or mix it with the onboard exciter. This means there’s enormous sound design possibilities as it’s sound will depend on what you feed into it!

This was an extremely challenging build and by the far the biggest i’ve done on ZOIA. There’s some very frustrating ZOIA quirks that made troubleshooting the polyphony switching pretty excruciating, but i’m very happy with the result. There’s more I wish i could have done but the CPU is well and truly maxed out. But as it stands, it's quite powerful!