collection of theremin performance links at changingscene.com...

hey all,

i started a channel at changingscene.com here:
Theremin Performances @ Changingscene.com (http://www.changingscene.com/Theremin%20Performances)

to sort of just make a giant pile links to fave theremin performances. i didn't really have time to add much material yet, but anybody is welcome to make an account and start adding youtube links to the pile... the only rule is that there is like real theremin actually being played in the video!

so as i was wandering sort of aimlessly through youtube, i came across this video of Gordon's white noise 2009 performance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZoe_GEsY8c)...

it is awesome, not only because of the noises being produced, but also because it is the only theremin performance i have seen where the theremin player checks his watch in the middle of a song (~3:47), heheh!

Ah, yes. That was because (1) I was determined to not overrun my allotted half-hour (2) I totally lose track of time when playing and (3) I forgot my cunning plan to put my watch on the top of my etherwave where I could glance discreetly at it.

Still, it's a fair record of the event (this was my third and final piece - my set was structured: Weird, Weirder, Weirdest.) The only thing that doesn't come across is the seismic bass; there were two massive stacks of speakers just out of shot - it was wonderful - earlier in the set I was hitting the room's resonant frequencies and making different parts of it shudder.

Anyway, the audio was clean enough that I extracted it from the youTube vid and gave it a good tweaking on the 'puter and it will be on my next album as Point Of Collapse (for Caché Vidja) because the videographer, Dwight, aka Caché, sadly passed on last month.

man, your ring modulator sounds great... are you modifying the carrier oscillator with anything, or is it just set to a particular frequency??

It doesn't have an internal oscillator - one input is fed from one output of a ping-pong delay, and the other input from the other output of the delay, so I am constantly modulating against what I did a second ago.

More detail here (http://beat-frequency.blogspot.com/2009/11/panic-box_08.html). (Same configuration as Gently Drowning.)

thanks for that! it sounds much, much cooler than the more typical stompbox ringmod!

Yeah. For some reason guitar effects pedals aren't designed with theremins in mind.

I've also got a Snarling Dogs Mold Spore (http://www.snarlingdogs.com/products/mspore.html) which is a combination wah pedal (*) and ring-mod with the pitch of the carrier controllable on the treadle. It ought to sound great - I'm not sure what the carrier waveform is - it's certainly not a sine wave - good and grungy - but it has got a darned noise gate that makes the volume response totally snappy all the time. Ugh.

Still - I'm arranging to have my etherwave modded in a way that should solve it. I'm getting line-level pitch preview and volume CV fitted - and an external VCA, so that I can feed the pedal full volume and put the volume loop after it, in effect.

(Actually, the mod kills two birds with one stone - I have similar problems with my recently acquired Synthex (http://www.abstractdata.biz/synthex/) - it's an oscillator with hard sync and FM - like a moog freqbox without the envelope follower, and therein lies the problem.)


(*) The Wah sounds great. Example - Dance Of The Flower Pot Men (http://www.youtube.com/user/GordonCharlton#p/c/D7884E47B7653960/2/7zfRSuUS92E) (on youTube)

heh, that's great... do you just have like a local guy who you commission to build you these modifications or do you do them yourself? i must say, even though i don't always use the cv's of my etherwave plus upgrade, having the headphone output (and being able to mute an output with the volume knob) is pretty handy...

i had posted somewhere before that i had bungled up my plus upgrade and moog fixed it for a $40 tuning fee claiming that the only problem was that it had been adjusted out of whack... but i am suspecting that they only said this in some sort of deference to my soldering ego, since i have noticed that now the 'power' LED is way brighter than it used to be. shrug.

say, in plummeting man, is there another synth occassionally generating pitches in discrete steps, or is that some fancy contraption that modulates your theremin pitch swoops into intervals or something?

the chordless chord is great stuff, i hadn't given it all a proper listen until just now. i would love to hear someone mix guru-guru style krautrock drums and bass on top of void ship, although that is probably just my own sick fascination with that kind of music!

PS - say, what software do you use to record? sorry if all of this territory has already been covered previously...

Mods - not me, I have no skills there. It's a local guy, a well qualified professional who is curious about theremins - he's doing it at close to cost in return for having a good poke around inside my etherwave. (He assures me that I couldn't afford him otherwise.)



Plummeting Man - that was recorded before I got my etherwave - the chain was Kees Enkelaar theremin --> Danelectro PB&J delay --> Fender Frontman 15R, miked with a Plantronics USB headset. After recording and cleaning up (see below) I chopped it up and made a collage of the bits in GarageBand.

The interesting bit about Plummeting Man was the use of electromechanical effects - devices introduced into the theremin's control zone to augment my hand movements.

The "wub-wub-wub" sound is a twangulator - an 18" steel rule strapped to a dining chair at one end and with the free end positioned under the volume loop and then twanged. (You probably did this at school with a wooden ruler and a desk.)

The "Gizmo, the cute creature from the film Gremlins singing" (if you don't know the film, then it's an alveolar trill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_trill)) sound is a frothatrill - a hand-held battery operated milk frother with a piece of fuse wire tangled in the whisk and sticking out like a single propellor blade. Correctly oriented in the pitch field it makes for a faster vibrato than I can achieve with my hand. (If I had unlimited funds I'd get a dentist's drill with a speed control pedal and use it for mechanical FM synthesis!)

I have since added a third electromechanical effect to my armoury - the [i]bacchetta di intervalli[/i] (interval wand) AKA the FLS (Very Long Screwdriver), as featured in the aforementioned White Noise 2009 performance, which is, in fact, a very long screwdriver - the shaft is about the same length as the etherwave's pitch rod. This is held in the pitch hand by the non-conductive handle and pointed towards the pitch rod. Touching the metal shaft with a fingertip makes the pitch jump instantaneously.



Recording - these days I take the XLR out from my SR Technology Jam 150+ combo amp & mixer into an M-Audio Firewire Solo audio interface, and thence into my MacBook, where I record with Amadeus Pro so I can remove any trace amounts of hiss and any clicks and pops that I don't like (I leave in the ones that I do like.) After that I'll either add a bit of stereo reverb and maybe some faux stereo still in Amadeus Pro, or if I want to do something fancy I'll take it into GarageBand and finish the piece there.



PS You're welcome to do mixes if you want. I'd be interested to hear the results.

that is amazing - here i was wrangling in my head with all sorts of effects-module methods of accomplishing the same pitch modulation and totally forgot about the frothatrill and interval wand!! are there any youtube videos of this in action?

i'll keep my thinking cap on regarding remixes - i was also thinking that a tarkovsky-esque (e.g. non-campy) science fiction movie would go well with a lot of the disc as well, but regrettably don't know anyone doing that kind of movie just yet!