Annulus brings Rings-inspired modular resonance to Mac and Windows
A free Mac and Windows plugin turns Mutable Instruments Rings’ cult resonator engine into a DAW-ready instrument for non-modular rigs.
Annulus arrived as an immediate bridge between modular myth and everyday production: a free Mac and Windows plugin from Jonas Eriksson built around the physical-modeling engine behind Mutable Instruments Rings. For vintage-synth collectors who never bought into Eurorack, that makes the Rings sound family feel suddenly close enough to load in a session, not just admire from the other side of a rack rail.
Rings earned its reputation for a reason. Mutable Instruments’ resonator module was reviewed in Sound On Sound in July 2016 and quickly became one of the most admired names in the format because it could turn an external excitation signal into pitched, harmonic material that sounded alive, not synthetic in the generic sense. Its documentation lays out three resonator models, modal, sympathetic strings, and modulated or inharmonic strings, and the manual says the module can run in one-, two-, or four-note polyphony. That mix of string-like behavior, metallic bloom, and playable chords is the source of the cult around it, and it is the sound Annulus is trying to carry forward.
Eriksson has framed Annulus as a polyphonic resonator and effects engine rather than a strict module copy, but the appeal for older keyboard and rack users is obvious. A player sitting on a DX7, a rack of hardware, or a DAW-based setup can reach for the Rings character without buying a case, chasing cables, or building a MIDI-to-CV bridge just to experiment with resonant textures. That makes it useful as a sketchpad for ideas, a layer under a vintage polysynth, or a live-performance support instrument when a setup needs one more voice of harmonic shimmer without one more piece of hardware.
The release also lands inside a wider Rings afterlife. A free Max for Live port appeared earlier this year, and an alternative firmware reported in April pushed the module toward a Mini-Elements style physical-modeling synth, extending the same core idea in another direction. Softube also offers the only software version officially licensed and endorsed by Mutable Instruments, which shows how far the original design has traveled beyond Eurorack. Annulus fits that lineage neatly: it does not try to erase Rings, but to move its resonator engine into a broader studio world where the old divide between hardware and software keeps getting thinner.
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