Gordon's Progress

Stop it you guys! If my head swells it makes my halo too tight and I get all cranky. :-)

I'm way behind on my Spellbound listening - about ten hour's worth. Dave, if you make a "woo-hoo I'm on spellbound" posting when your piece appears I'll make a special effort to listen to it. But be warned - there are people who have been on the blunt end of my critiques that are still sitting in darkened rooms and trembling.

I thinks it's more likely that the horns will fall off...

The goose is getting fat, and all that, so I got around to thinking about a pressie for the missus. Having recently dragged my record player out of mothballs I was thinking about those recording booths one sees in department stores in old movies, and wondered if there was an online equivalent.

It seems there is - took a while to find on google - good keywords are [i]vinyl dubplate service[/i].

(Vinyl dubplates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubplate) are a recent innovation - there is some debate in the drum 'n' bass world, and doubtless elsewhere too, as to whether they are as good as the acetate discs they supersede, but there is no doubt they are cheaper and more durable. The vinyl cutting machines are also inexpensive enough that a little cottage industry has sprung up around them.)

Long and short is - I'm getting one cut by http://www.carverycuts.com/. (I also found one that looks quite good in the US - http://customrecords.com/.

If that's something that appeals (and I figure it might be - there are plenty of us that were attracted to the theremin for its anachronism) there is just about time to get one cut in time for the 25th - or leave it this time and I'll report the results after Christmas.

I am on what many would consider the "wrong" side of the vinyl vs. CD debate.

I have a few friends who insist that vinyl sounds better. "Warmer" is the word they often use but are never able to define. (Perhaps it means "scratchier"!)

Having said that, I do have an appreciation for mechanical sound reproduction. I love my ancient Victrola and I am looking for old theremin records from the 20's and 30's to play on it.

I like vinyl LP's for their nostalgic appeal but I will never be convinced that they somehow sound better than CD's or other digital media.

As far as a present for the wife, it would probably be great!. It would show you made much more effort than simply burning a CD...

Just my two cents' worth.

Well, there's nostalgia, and there's also the business of peering intently at a row of albums, taking one out of its sleeves, checking for dust and fingerprints, blowing fluff off the stylus, delicately lowering the needle, adjusting the volume to suit that particular record and settling down to listen to the whole thing from start to finish. People grow to like the ritual of it, like a tea ceremony, and it becomes a time to really get in the mood for listening and enjoying the music all the more as a consequence.

As for warmth: CDs reproduce high frequencies better. When I switched to CD I grew an almost instant dislike of cymbals and those drummers that can't resist going tss tss tss tss tss tss tss tss tss with them throughout the whole song, may they burn for all eternity.

Anyway, it's pretty much a cinch that Mrs C will like it - the A side is Laura reading a book out loud all by herself for the first time - Goodnight Moon. (B side is Void Ship.)

Got the 45, sounds good! Void Ship is a little on the quiet side, but that is because it is just about the maximum length a 45 can hold, and quite bassy.

Last week I saw the Navigators play, with Beatrix Ward-Fernandez (http://myspace.com/beatrixwardfernandez) on violin and theremin. Very good! As Beatrix said afterwards it would have been nice to see her playing with one of her other groups where she just played theremin, but what I saw, I liked. Beatrix has absolutely the fastest vibrato! Her hand was quite literally a blur! And very controlled - it did not vary in width at all - very tight.

And!

Dorit Chrysler is playing London in January. Details here: http://theremin.org.uk. I have already bought my ticket.

:-)

So, what did you get for Christmas Gordon? Well I'm glad you asked.

First up, how do you buy your own present and still be surprised? Fail completely to understand what you are buying!

So my "find an xmas pressy" strategy was simple - browse eBay until I find an effects pedal that catches my eye and order it.

And I found a Boss PS2 - digital pitch shifter and delay.

Here comes my line of thought. Pitch shifting is not very interesting, the equivalent of moving my hand a bit to one side. But combined with a delay, if I play a note shorter than the delay it will play a little arpeggio as each repeat gets pitch shifted a bit further. Play a note longer, with a sharp attack and I get "bells (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_effect)." OK, it's old technology, but even I've heard of the Boss reputation for robustness, and it will be a bit noisy and clunky, but that's OK - it is what it is.

Well, I was right about the last bit - it's a bit battered and needed a knob that it had lost, and it's a bit noisy and clunky, but that's OK. The rest I could not have been more wrong about.

It's either a delay or a pitch shift, not both at once, and it's not like moving my hand a bit to one side - the pitch shift has feedback, so I get my arpeggio, but with all the notes at once - a chord!

And I like it. I have octave up, octave down, and anything in between. At the moment I'm liking octave down particularly. The sound is thick and warm and velvety, like being wrapped in layers of soft blankets. Staccato notes are like the mad scientist has set his theremin aside in favour of his gothic organ complete with 64 foot pipes and is crashing down on the keys in time with the thunder rolling over the leaden sky. I exaggerate a little, but you get the idea. Slow down-strokes with a long delay are like falling, no, drifting down through a viscous fluid, that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, shivering with cold sweats under the duvet in the baleful yellow light of a 20 watt bulb that makes things appear wrong, like Watt's pot. (*)

Nice!

(*) From Watt, by Sam Beckett, “Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, at one of Mr. Knott’s pots, of one of Mr. Knott’s pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot. Well, perhaps not quite in vain, but very nearly. For it was not a pot, the more he looked, the more he reflected, the more he felt sure of that, that it was not a pot of which one could say, Pot, pot, and be comforted.”

Gordon,
I think you need an edit of * "Watt-Watt, pot,pot".
Kiss!
teslatheremin

Surely Knott!

I have been challenged. The prodigious Mungo Park has invited me to supply my interpretation of The Great Gig In The Sky by Pink Floyd.

As I suspected, finding the time to focus on this has been tricky, but I have made a little progress. I've listened to it quite a lot, which brought back some painful memories.

(Tip for the day: If you ever find yourself dressed as a seventeen year old punk rocker in a biker pub in the late Seventies complete with lots of big leather clad men with long hair, and your mate's sister shouts "What do you want to do now, Gordon?" across the pub to you, the correct answer is not "Let's get stoned and listen to Pink Floyd!" however witty you think it is.)

I have also examined the midi file MP supplied, and watched footage of a performance on youTube.

Conclusion - it's a tune with a beginning, middle and end - it follows a traditional narrative structure. The beginning is a Scotsman telling us he's not afraid of dying in a butch, carefree, factual sort of way. I'm minded of the cartoon sequence where the central character adopts a jaunty walk, cocks his hat and whistles. You know what's coming next.

Yes, it's an open manhole. The middle, the violent bit with the drums and the girlie screaming.

This segues into the third part, where the translucent angel drifts up from the manhole complete with harp and halo and ascends into the clouds.

Quite a challenge indeed. There's a lot of different moods in the piece, from bold and confident to surprised and startled to confused and lost to slow realisation to calm acceptance to celestial ecstasy. No wonder the original required two voices to cover the range. And the singer - at once free and imaginative and, given the drama of the subject matter, controlled and understated.

Do I stand a hope of bringing everything to the piece that the original has? Of course not. But I think it's going to be a bit of fun seeing where I go with it.

So at the moment I'm practicing my operatic voice, all melody and vibrato, trying to get into the various moods and let them pour out of my hands and through the theremin.

And it occurs to me that the timing is fortuitous - next month I'm off to White Label Music's Sonic Weekender to try my hand at playing along with a bunch of non-theremin musicians, so this seems like good rehearsal.

Gordon, my Boss Bass effects unit has pitch shift and it is a blast to play with!

The pitch can even be pedal-controlled, which is a lot of fun as well.