New Video from Carolina Eyck

This performance is so good it deserves to have some attention drawn to it!

Wow, wonderful!  Not a lot of vibrato, which must make the performance even more difficult to pull off.  Is she using pitch preview, or just those monitors?

As far as I know, Carolina does not use a pitch preview of any kind. Hey….neither did Clara Rockmore. I believe, like Clara, Carolina possesses perfect pitch.

I should add that perfect pitch does not compensate for the lack of a pitch preview. Without some kind of preview, perfect pitch or not, you still have to fish audibly for your starting note. This can be very annoying for other musicians as well as the audience. In the recording studio, pitch fishing can ruin an otherwise perfect “take”.

You are right - she possesses perfect pitch. Let's go fishing, fine with me. 

The inability of a musician, in the absence of sound, to know what note will be heard when the volume is raised, is one of the conceptual flaws of the theremin when it is played as a precision instrument. For sound FX and certain types of “free” or experimental music, this disadvantage may not make any difference, but for melodic, precision playing it creates a number of challenges.

The early ondes prototypes of Maurice Martenot were very theremin-like, with the player standing several feet from the instrument and playing “à distance” like a thereminist (except that the ondiste had a fine wire attached to a finger of the right hand). After consultation with some of the finest musicians and composers of his day, Martenot realized that the ondes could never be successful as a serious musical instrument unless some of the uncertainties were removed from its design.

An audio or visual preview can remove the starting note problem for thereminists, as well as the difficulty of pitch hand reorientation after a long pause in a composition.

Granted, some listeners say they don’t mind the sound of pitch fishing from a theremin. These people are fans of the instrument and they realize fishing just comes with the territory. It’s another thing altogether if you are a violinist or a cellist playing in an ensemble next to a theremin and the player keeps beeping like a cell phone someone forgot to turn off, just to find a note!

As far as the theremin eventually being accepted on a par with the piano, the violin or the guitar is concerned, that will never happen. The instrument is far too difficult to play. It took RCA two years (1929 to 1931) to realize that their master plan to have “…a theremin in every home” was a pipe dream!

"An audio or visual preview can remove the starting note problem for thereminists, as well as the difficulty of pitch hand reorientation after a long pause in a composition. 

Granted, some listeners say they don’t mind the sound of pitch fishing from a theremin. These people are fans of the instrument and they realize fishing just comes with the territory. It’s another thing altogether if you are a violinist or a cellist playing in an ensemble next to a theremin and the player keeps beeping like a cell phone someone forgot to turn off, just to find a note!

As far as the theremin eventually being accepted on a par with the piano, the violin or the guitar is concerned, that will never happen. The instrument is far too difficult to play. It took RCA two years (1929 to 1931) to realize that their master plan to have “…a theremin in every home” was a pipe dream!" - coalport

Peter, I agree with your first graph.  For the second, as a listener I'm a semi-fan of the Theremin, and as a listener I'm totally aware that it's all too easy for me to say, but I find obvious pitch fishing pretty much a turn-off.  For the last graph, I think it's rather unfortunate that the Theremini wasn't better designed because, while the note spacing is adjustable, it isn't very linear.  And a wider, linear note spacing would probably help most beginners.  A more useful pitch display would have helped too.  Instead they seem to have pursued the fake nerd on TV market, whether intentionally or not (I find the latter easier to believe because they don't seem to understand basic Theremin physics nor the dangers of ESD).

The Moog THEREMINI is a toy. It is not an instrument for a serious thereminist or for anybody who intends to become one.

Out of curiosity, I bought a THEREMINI when they first came out and was disappointed, to say the least. It suffers from “latency” because its digital processors (as you know, it is not a heterodyne instrument) cannot sample at a fast enough rate to keep up with a reasonably skilled player - so it lags.

Within a short time after its release, Moog Music announced a Ver. 2 firmware update in a desperate attempt to correct some of the flaws that were giving the instrument a rather bad reputation but, as Thierry Frenkel pointed out at the time, the latency problem was built into the hardware and could not be fixed by an update. I kept my THEREMINI until I had installed the new Ver. 2 firmware then, since there was no improvement in the instrument, I got rid of the thing on ebay.

As Carolina Eyck said in her THEREMINI demo video some while back, it’s a fun musical device to take to parties.

I’m not absolutely certain, but I believe I was the first theremin player to introduce the audio pitch preview (about 20 years ago) and many people now use one. Visual previews are too slow to be of any use to thereminists playing at the professional level. The instrument has to analyze where you are in the electrostatic field, then it has to translate that onto a screen, the player has to look at it and correlate placement with pitch. This may only take a microsecond, but that is an eternity when timing is everything. An audio preview, on the other hand, is instantaneous.

What ya hear is what ya get! 👂🏻

Peter, I'm not aware of any analysis of the Theremini by Thierry.  I bought an early one and did a pictorial teardown here on TW, along with some latency analysis via FM modulated RF, the audio out, and Adobe Audition software.  ILYA figured out the oscillator topology, and FredM made some engineering comments as well.  

There may very well be heterodyning going on in there (there usually is so that slow digital hardware like a processor interrupt can handle it) but not for voice generation.  

As for the latency being "baked in" I'm not so sure I'd make that statement.  The instrument is hobbled with low voltage swing at the antennas, but there are probably ways to get sufficient gestural bandwidth.  I have a feeling much of the bandwidth limitation is at the internal MIDI interface (speculation: zipper/hum filter).  Their engineers went too crazy trying to smooth things out, low-pass filtering and averaging will hide a multitude of technical sins (though it can easily make it less responsive and therefore playable).

I wish I'd held onto it for a couple of more months just to be able to compare gestural bandwidth before and after, but I ditched mine on the used market just before the V2 firmware.  Could you give me a flavor of what I missed out on (original vs. V2 firmware)?  

Hi dews, Thierry’s remarks about the latency problem (and the smoothing) were not part of any official analysis of the instrument. They were part of the endless conversations we ALL had about the THEREMINI right here in TW when the instrument came on the market a few years ago. Gordon Charlton also had some interesting technical observations at that time.

As for giving you some sense of the flavor you missed out on, that will be difficult. I fwowed up! 😝