Thierry wrote [i]The Plus version may be of interest for people who want to tinker around with sound effects and synths, but what is commonly called "playability" is not at all affected. If I look at the Moog demonstration videos, I can't stop thinking that this has nothing in common with Clara Rockmore's or Sam Hoffman's playing. In my eyes these additional features of the Plus degrade it from a musical instrument to a simple gesture controller.[/i]
No disrespect to EricK or the guys from Moog, but I don't think there has been an etherwave plus demo video yet that realises the actual potential of theremin with CV.
Let's talk about an analogous situation...
My father doesn't like Science Fiction movies. He calls them special effects movies, because they depict events that contravene the laws of physics so are impossible in the real world and he is not comfortable with that. What he likes is a nice historical drama - just as unrealistic as Sci-Fi in many ways, but at least there is no danger that Catherine of Aragon will suddenly morph into a teapot.
So he dismisses the whole notion of special effects in movies. Except, of course, these days [i]ALL[/i] Hollywood movies are special effects movies. It's just that the movies he likes use effects subtly - they are not obvious, but they enhance the movie in a thousand tiny ways. And they are processed using exactly the same software. Final Cut Studio or equivalent products from other companies.
The theremin plus demos on youtube are not equivalent to a historical drama. They're not even equivalent to a Sci-Fi movie. They're more like a snapshot of the day the technician installed Final Cut Studio on his computer and spent some time having fun messing about with the more extreme effects. This sort of thing is interesting to other people in the same profession, but the general public would have a hard time extrapolating from it to the movie they just watched on TV.
To cite Peter Pringle as an example of a classical thereminist, he chooses which theremin to use for a particular piece according to its timbres. For one piece it might be Hoffman's RCA, for another the Moog Ethervox and so on. Whichever is most appropriate. I say timbre[b]s[/b] advisedly because the timbre of a theremin varies with pitch, and to some extent with volume. To create that sort of subtle variation on a conventional analogue synthesiser requires the synth to know what pitch is being played, and at what volume, and that is exactly the information that CV provides. (If anyone is reading this who has both experience of playing classical music and modular synthesis would like to add their thoughts I would be grateful. As is often the case with my comments this is mostly guesswork.)
Tangentially - I think Moog missed a trick with the Plus (and the Pro.) It would be neat if they also had CV in to allow the Waveform and Brightness (and Filter) to be controlled dynamically during a performance.
