Hi,

I have had good luck with  www.sounddogs.com . It will cost a couple of bucks. I think the last time I spent $25. for 7 effects. They have lots to chose fom and you can download to your computer. You can preview before you buy. I burn it to a cd and go from there.

Linda

For a production I worked on last year, we just used a bell or buzzer type thing from offstage. The phoen was SR so behind the set SR was where the sound was located.  It was very realistic and worked well.  The trick to this was timing.  We had a stage manager call the cue by when the phone was supposed to ring in the show.  The stage hand immidately "rang the phone"  Then when the actor on stage touched the receiver, the SM called the cue for the sound to stop. 

You can probably pick up some kind of buzzer or something at a garage sale or thrift shop.  And, if you don't have someone calling the show, just work on the timing a little and it will work out fine.

If you want to make a phone actually ring...
I think I mentioned this in another thread, but when I was being cheap, I created a 30Hz tone on my computer, and recorded it as a CD track. I  hooked up a phone directly to the speaker outputs on an amplifier, and played the CD through that. You just basically turn up the volume until it has enough voltage to make the phone ring.

I still have the CD track on my computer, if you want it. The spacing between rings is set up for an American style ring pattern.

-Tom


EDIT: Even though this uses a CD player to make it work, you are really making the phone ring. This is the poor man's solution to using transformers to wire a phone. It does the same thing, but in an unconventional way.

I agree with Patrick that it is a far better way than an audio effect.
It is not difficult to rig up a phone ringer box to be operated off stage. The first one I made was fairly primitive & I forgot to add in  the latch relay into the bell/tone circuit, so when the receiver is picked up it drops the relay out & switches off the ringer.
This is much better than relying on a visual cue from the warm props, that could be missed & become rather embarrassing.
You will probably find a member of your group can quite easily set this up. The only hiccup is running the phone cable on stage & masking it, then finding a receiver with a suitable ring tone to fit the genre of the production. You can also find phone schematic circuits on the net, but in most cases it is simple enough on inspection of the receiver to trace it out & energise the ringer. Check the rating plate on the unit first for the correct DC Voltage, most are either 12 or 24VDC, but others will & do vary depending on it?s vintage & the country of manufacture.

When we did "Belles" last year we used a home-made Tele-Q set up to operate up to 6 phones either individually or all at once (as happened in the first cue).  As JoeMc has stated, the relay drops out when the phone is picked up so you don't have those oh-so-embarrassing "phone still ringing after being pick-up" moments.  The simple push-to-ring operation also meant we could ring different phones with different patterns, and by ringing the specific on-stage phones, after a while the audience was ablut to decern whose phone was ringing.  Worked like a charm. 

If you happen to be doing a comedy where you require the phone to continue ringing after being pick-up, you simply plug in an off-stage phone.