I am reading through all these sound design books and articles. I figured maybe it would be good to set up what they are describing and fiddle with it, while I read.

My current goal is to set up "Amplitude Modulation" with Reaktor.
Its only my 10th or so time craking up this software.

I started an instrument, but I am confused as to what math to put between the gate, carrier, and modulator.

I know I want no effect when the A of the modulating sin osc is 0.
I know a sin goes between -1 and 1.
I know that when A of the modulating sin osc is (1? or 127?..full) and the sin is at 1, I want the A of the carrier at 1...or I think so..

Here is a screenshot of what I have so far:
http://www.christopherpisz.is-a-geek.com/temp/Reaktor_AMod.j pg


How should I rig up the bottom left?

I'm no expert but this is my interpretation. Apologies if I'm telling you something you already know. I also may just be wrong

With amplitude modulation, it is in effect the same as rapidly wiggling the knob on an amplifier and, as an amplifier only does from 0 to full amplification (o to 1 in this case), you need your modulator signal, which it seems is a sine wave, to go from 0 to 1, rather than the natural -1 to 1. You can achieve this by adding 1 to the modulator signal, then dividing by 2. Then I believe you can just multiply the carrier and modulator signals together.

For real-world audio modulator signals (not sine waves)you may need a better way of taking the signal from -1 to +1 format to 0 to +1 format. One way of doing this is to rectify the signal. This can be very simply done by squaring (multiply by itself) then taking the square root of the result, although in practice there may be better options.

Another option is to take the use an amplifier module in reaktor. Wire the carrier signal to input 1, then use the modulator signal to vary the output of the amp. You may still need to rectify the modulator signal for this to work though.

If I am not mistaken, if you take the carrier and modulator and just multiply then together then that'll be ring modulation.

also, in order to scale the amplitude of the modulator signal before it modifies the carrier signal, you can multiply the modulator signal with a panel knob which has values of 0 to 1.

OK, I'm done now. Bring on the onslaught or people who actually know what they are talking about

Isn't ringmod just multiplication? So if one signal is A and the other is B, then a ring mod outputs A*B.