Gordon's Progress

I remember the ebow - basically adds an infinite bow to a guitar - I think Godley and Creme (of 10cc) promoted it in the UK.

This is a very subtle effect. I remember as a child when the piano tuner visited and I asked him about the piano.

"So why does each key have three strings - to make it louder?"

     "Not just that, listen."

He tuned each string to exactly the same note. It sounded very thin and plain. Then he tightened one just a tiny bit and loosened another a similar amount. Now the note was a lot richer and more interesting.

It's like that - like my cluster drone, but a lot tighter and more controlled than I could manage by wriggling my fingers.

Of course, once you move away from the simple sports massagers to more intimate devices of a similar nature there are a greater range of vibrations available - some of the marital-aid variety have very ornate, (not to say alarming!) movements. I wonder how they would work. (And if anyone is brave enough to start a posting with the words "I tried using my rampant rabbit...")

Dude, the first post on this subject made me wonder what I might find down at the Velvet Touch (one of three "Marital Aid" shops in Ypsi). I think I may have to go look now.

Edweird, such a trip is going to take a little forethought. If you are going tomorrow, it will be Saturday so the shops will be busy. You might want to conceal your identity. Perhaps a long coat or a cloak and a full visor crash-helmet. Black is a good look. Of course someone may speak to you, so pretend you have laryngitis or asthma, or both.

Now, with regard to choosing the device, a more powerful one will clearly have a stronger effect, and for showmanship perhaps one that lights up. That would look great in a concert. Oh, and obviously balance is important, so you should try it out in the shop, hold it and move it dramatically from side to side to see if it feels comfortable, perhaps making woo-woo noises to really get in the mood.

A couple of other things. Please ask a friend to follow you with a camcorder, and if the shopkeeper asks you who the heck you think you are, just answer "I am your father, Luke."

Saturday morning. Everyone else in the house is having a lie in, so I figured I'd search google a while and see how many people had thought of the sports/personal massager trick before me. Well someone had, but just the one person had mentioned it online. But - more interestingly, the mention was made on a whole new theremin band's website, complete with a six minute video clip (a cover of Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby,) including musical use of said device. It's a Japanese female trio with a unique selling point - which means this link comes with a parental advisory notice - "Don't tell your parents." :-)

No seriously, er, how can I put this politely, they don't have a costume budget. So - don't click on the link below if you are under-age or offended by the naked female form, or at work, or - well just don't click on it, ok?

http://TheRudeyNudies.co.jp/ (javascript:alert("April Fool"))

(But is the theremin playing any good? I don't know - I watched the clip half a dozen times and found it rather hard to focus on the music!)

Wonder if I caught any April fish?

No matter. Continuing with the light-hearted but irrelevant theme, Frappr didn't want me to upload this, for some reason. So I'll put it here instead...

[img]http://charlton.demon.co.uk/~gordon/caricature.jpg[/img]

Your hook caught me by surprise first thing Sat. AM. I totally forgot what day it was till then.
Though I can assure you I was only clicking on it for the theremin aspect.

Well, haven't I been sneaky!

The Happy Birthday Theremin World (http://secretsurprise.blogspot.com) thing. At last I can talk about it.

OK, first up, getting the team together. That was fun in itself - not enough time to find absolutely everyone, so sorry if you didn't get invited, but the lack of personal messaging was a bit of a nuisance (and the real reason for me asking for PMs in TW 2.0 in another thread) so I went for names I remembered from spellbound and active posters in the musical forums on TW, mostly. Basically I kept looking for people until I had about 20, which seemed about the right number. I made use of the frappr and myspace PM systems, email addresses I found on the Internet, and with the assistance of a levnet subscriber, their mailing list. Some were harder to find than others or didn't check their frappr PMs (the real reason for my posting to another thread about checking frappr PMs), and required a bit of intensive googling. Helped that I once worked for the Department of Social Security finding people who had dropped out of sight. This was the real reason for DiggyDog's "You found me" thread - found him by emailing a friend who mentioned him on their blog. Even creepier was contacting CharlieD via his school's webmaster, who turned out to be a bit of a theremin fan, via the Bonzo Dog Band, and prompting a revision of his school's website policy as a result. Also other real reason for putting kkissinger in touch with Terry Wright earlier on this thread - shortly after that I emailed Terry to pass on a message when Kevin contacted him.

Next came fleshing out the plan. I put together an impromptu mailing list by Cc:ing all the participants, and subjected them to a bewildering few days of revision after revision. I have to admit to having previous experience of organising stuff on the net - the big one - Internet Lodge (http://internet.lodge.org.uk) - was two years in the planning and involved a whole lot of people. So this little plot was small potatoes. Nonetheless it took me a good week to get back into the swing of it. Big kudos to Peter Pringle for just stepping in and taking on the role of musical director, and really getting the idea of putting out revisions of the backing track to the list and acting on feedback. The guy is a real trooper! I have always found that when I'm on the right track things just fall neatly into place and Peter was there when he was needed.

With regard to my playing. If Peter was one extreme, he was having a walk in the park with this, or at least that was the impression I got from the sheer speed that he could produce brilliant mp3s, then I was at the other end, really going for it and rehearsing as much as I could. Towards the end it was recognisable, if a little painful. Exactly until I hit the record button, and my hands developed a mind of their own, and I was kind of watching, going "what the heck is that?" and reining them back to the melody. Tried three times, each with the same result, straight up to the high notes and leaping all over. Finally I played for my wife with the backing track on speakers and she gave it the seal of approval, so I went with what my hands wanted to do.

The other 17 theremin parts were a wonderful selection of straight melodies, harmonies, avant-gardey stuff, a walking bass-line and a really clever use of moogfoogers. (That's what gives that voice-boxy quality in the third part of the piece.) And nicely distributed amongst the bass, middle and treble parts. Ditto for the singers. (Not everyone sang, not quite everyone supplied a theremin part, but a few supplied more than one, and that let me make the number of theremins the same as the number of contributors, which was pleasing.)

As they came in I cleaned up each track for noise when required, normalised it and dropped it into garageband, aligned it against the backing track and put a mix-down of the resultant mashup onto my server to keep the act

One final thought.

Although the Big Band sound is largely absent, because everyone played or sang along to it, it informs the entire piece, like a template or a mould that is later removed. In a very odd sense this is a piece of music (and I mean this with the very greatest respect) defined by a Peter Pringle shaped hole!

Wow! So much work, so much coordination!

You're [i]definately[/i] getting a private messages feature in TW2.0 for all that effort :)

I'm back.

Came out of the birthday thing, and pretty much straight into Easter hols (recess) culminating in a weekend trip to Shropshire. Consequently I've had virtually no time theremining, and I'm cream crackered (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cre2.htm). But I got a bunch of new things I want to try out in a composition, and a working title - the plummeting man.

"So far, so good," said the plummeting man.

I've plummeted twice in my life. Once involuntarily, down a cliff, and once voluntarily, off the high diving board. It's an oddly uplifting experience. That's what I want to describe. I have a foundation in mind - an extension of my police siren into epicycloids (http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMT668.Student.Folders/BrombacherAarnout/EMT669/cycloids/hypotrochoid2.mov), synchronised with my new-found volume control to give ascending runs of descending slides, and descending runs of ascending slides, with a nice long delay applied to make a rich, rhythmic texture. Once I have that on playback, then I want to see how my battery-powered vibrato fits on top of it.

I've got a new one - "real air guitar" - this is a bit of showmanship - stand with your hip beside the volume antenna, facing the pitch antenna. Volume hand down by hip ready to strum the strings (ie move it away from the antenna, releasing the sound) volume hand holding the neck of the guitar. Flick the Kees over to saw-tooth to make a harder sound, crank up the gain and drive volume on the amp, snappy delay, not too wet, then play. It's not guitar, but it's darn rockin'. And I get to play at being a rock-god too!

I want to see if I can get that to work for my plummeting man too.