Moog Etherwave Theremin: Mysteries Of The Theremin Unlocked
Bill Holland and Owen O'Malley go to the outer space branch of Gearwire studio where they're attacked by paper plate UFOs. But it's all in the name of science (fiction), you see! Bill explains more of the non-obvious functions and controls on the theremin, and he and Owen each give their takes on different tunes that you may even semi-recognize!
[OWEN O'MALLEY PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
BILL HOLLAND: Klaatu barada nikto! Welcome back to Gearwire. I’m Bill Holland. This is one of the earliest electronic synthesizers, the Theremin, developed by Leon Theremin around a little after the turn of the century. This was popularized by many composers who found to be the first really intuitive and inspirational electronic instruments, and it was used by many composers, most famously really adapted by Hollywood in movies like “The Lost Weekend” and the “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, and it features prominently in those movies as kind of an otherworldly...
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
...sound. One thing to keep in mind about the theremin, it has the control section here. The control section consists of two metal antennae which are they sense position of the player’s hands, this one being the control radio frequency and this one being volume so you’ll see here.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
On the left, I’m controlling my volume.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
On the right, I’m controlling pitch.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
You can do vibrato by shaking a little bit. Now also, the tone produced is produced by what is called a beat frequency oscillator. It consists of two high-frequency oscillators which are made up of a detector circuit which extracts difference frequency or beat frequency. There’s a high frequency oscillator which operates at 285 kHz and a variable pitch oscillator that operates between 282 and 285. The difference on this operates from range 0 to 3 kHz which is actually 3.5 octaves above middle C so check it out.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
There you’re hearing your variable pitch oscillator.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
So now I’m going to show you how to tune the theremin. What you want to do is to turn the volume clockwise all the way, grab the pitch antenna here, and turn it counterclockwise until you hear the volume decrease, put your hand over on the volume antenna, and then remove.
Okay, there we go. Now, what we want to do is we want to is we want to actually set our amplifier and make sure you know how loud you want to be because now you’ll have an idea of how loud it’s going to be in performance, and then we’re going to take the pitch control. Stand where you want to stand for a performance, grab the pitch control. So, if I want my hand to start here, let’s say I want the range because we’re basically setting the range of how this thing is going to play, I might start, you know, bottom of my scale, I don't know, here might be good, and make sure your body -- none of your body is in front of that, so your hand is always in front of your body or, you know, level with your shoulder. Shoulder is always a good reference point. Turn it to the left till I have nothing then bring it to the left until I hit right at the bass there.
So now you’ll see the starting point is here. If I move back, I have no signal. But I want this to be the very bottom so I want to take that into the empty part there, and now...
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
...if I want to be tighter, I can move in front of it here.
[BILL HOLLAND CALIBRATING THE MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
Now the range is really small.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
If I want it to be extremely large....
[BILL HOLLAND CALIBRATING THE MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
And then brightness control and waveform just kind of control the shape of the actual tone.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
So there it’s tuned and now we can play. Again, this is your volume control and here you have the pitch.
[BILL HOLLAND PERFORMING ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
Like it kind of sounded like something but I’ll let Owen show you his rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.
[OWEN O'MALLEY PERFORMING “OVER THE RAINBOW” ON A MOOG MUSIC ETHERWAVE THEREMIN]
A real pro
Not to diss Bill and Owen, but listen here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pamelia_kurstin_plays_the_theremin.html
cool!
I will check it out. I love the theremin, and I wish I had enough time with this new one to really get halfway decent at it. It's much harder than it looks, as I'm sure you know. Thanks a lot!
dang
in my own defense, i had about 1 hour on the thing before we shot this -- and it's WAY harder than I had assumed. also far more addicting. that said, the kurstin vid is pretty unbelievable. dang
side note: that particular theremin model (it appears to be an Ethervox MIDI Theremin) comes with a pitch-cue audio output, allowing the player to hear what pitch their right hand is dictating without making the pitch audible to an audience. it helps quite a great deal with intonation. it appears that ms. kurstin is not employing the pitch-cue. double dang
great video
that was fun, haha, i liked that video.
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