Gordon's Progress

Just to clarify, "Hooters" is a chain in the US that serves chicken, etc. The servers wear hot pants and skimpy tops however they are not topless.

Thanks for the pointer Tom - I have passed it on to my wife, who is very interested.

I went to a topless bar once. It was raining. I got soaked. :-)

The UK has one branch of Hooters Restaurants. In Nottingham, apparently. It is outnumbered by Hooters Musical Instruments 4:1.

My etherwave arrived today.

There appears to be a slight problem with it. Putting my hand very close to the volume antenna, even touching it, does not cause it to go completely silent. A very thin tone persists. Almost the ghost of a note. Handy for pitch fishing, I guess, but not really desirable.

I skyped Moog, and the customer support guy's first guess was that there is some bleed-through to my guitar amp. If that is the case apparently what I want is a "pad" AKA an "attenuator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuator)". A quick trip to wikipedia (see link above) confirmed that this was the keyword I had failed to find in three days of searching. I asked if a volume pedal would perform the same function. Probably.

As my pedal should be arriving in two or three days we shall see if that fixes it.

With regards to the pedal, Mike turned out to be very helpful and knowledgeable - and from my place of birth, Middlesbrough. We got on well. The pedal in the post is not a Bespeco, but it is absolutely identical apart from the badge. There's a factory somewhere that churns them out and then a variety of companies stick on their own badges.

Back to the etherwave... The sound is very thin until I turn the volume knob on my amp up to 2, which is a bit loud - don't want to upset the neighbours too much. With the Kees 1.5 was sufficient to get a good sound without being too loud. Yet another reason for the pedal. For the time being I am sticking to the bottom quarter of the volume field. I think the lesson here is: [i]If you're getting an amp at the same time as your etherwave, take Moog's advice and buy a keyboard amp[/i].

Here's another reason. Why the heck did they put the audio-out on the front? The only way I can arrange my echo boxes on the top of the instrument and use a patch lead to plug them in is to have them facing the wrong way. One side-effect of using a volume pedal at floor level will be to negate that problem.

OK. Enough moaning. Hopefully my problems will disappear by Thursday and I'll be left with all the good bits.

The sound is good. I like it best at the moment with the waveform turned fully clockwise and the brightness fully anticlockwise. A soft tone, which is what I am used to with the Kees. I anticipate finding uses for other settings in due course. The lowest notes are not muddy like the Kees.

The pitch antenna field is good. More of it is usably linear, especially in the low notes. It lacks the ultra-high-pitch non-linear region of the Kees.

It looks good. It's a bit longer than the Kees, and slimmer. And you can't go wrong with black.

The manuals. A few photocopied sheets stapled together. How cheap. And the censor has been at them, obliterating every instance of the word Moog, because of trademark issues in the UK. Which is not a problem, but it does mean that the eMail address at the back is "info@--------------". D'oh.

The DVD. I have yet to watch it carefully, but had a chance to see most of it whilst washing up. It prompted an interesting thought...

Am I right in thinking that both Clara Rockmore and Lydia Kavina were/are of particularly diminutive stature? I rather got that idea when Lydia took several steps backwards to play the low notes. It seems to me that is probably a major factor in determining their playing style. They both seem to need to extend their arms and fingers to full stretch to reach the high notes.

I'm just a smidgeon short of six foot, and I use a back-handed "then the farmer sows the seeds" movement from my breastbone to the pitch antenna that easily covers the full range, and I feel gives me

that ghost signal you were getting was a problem with a lot of the Pros, but no onje's mentioned it with a standard. It seems to come and, on mine anyway.

Andy

Gordon,

Your description of the ghost tone sounds like the volume antenna isn't quite perfectly adjusted. I take it you've tried the volume knob at its extremes and you still can't get the tone to go away? Is it better with the volume knob at one extreme or another? If so, then it might be solveable by adjusting the internals of the instrument. Check your manuals for details. That would involve opening the case and a lot of tedious work (and don't forget you'd need the special plastic screwdriver for making the adjustments), so it'd be a pain in the neck, but perhaps less so than returning it to Moog.

A guitar amp really, really sucks for using with the Theremin. I know, I made the same mistake. It sounds SO much better with an appropriate amp!

Why do you want to use a volume pedal with it, anyway? I'm afraid I missed that.

You could place your echo devices on a small table nearby. There really shouldn't be anything on top of the instrument, it could interfere with proper tuning of the pitch antenna.

Yeah, placing the audio out on the front is kind of dumb. I also really dislike that they used a DIN connector for the power supply. I hate DIN connectors. They always eventually break and then they're a huge pain to replace.

Actually, you can go wrong with black: I believe Peter Pringle painted his with a black paint that had a metallic base, and had to sand it all off and repaint with something else after that interfered with the instrument. Personally, I put a coat of high gloss polyurethane on mine, I like it better shiny. It looks like lacquer.

Yes, Clara was tiny by our standards. Lydia may well be too, it's hard to say, but she's Russian and we have better nutrition in western countries, and that makes for taller people overall. But, the fact that they move more than Peter to hit different notes is more a stylistic choice than necessity of their size.

Hi Andy. That's interesting that this is a "feature" of some ePros. Is there a known cause and/or fix for it? (I guess not if you still have it a now and then.)

Tom. No, turning the volume tuning knob makes no discernible difference. If it is a manufacturing fault I would not ship it back to Moog - I'd take back to the shop I got it from, which is within travelling distance. Even with "b-stock" goods have to be fit for the purpose, and this is the responsibility of the vendor in accordance with the Sale of Goods Act under UK law.

Something else I have noticed that may be relevant. After I have played it for a while, tapping the volume antenna with my finger causes it to make a very brief tone, loud at first and diminishing rapidly to the ghost-tone level. "Pew!" Tapping it again shortly after does not produce this effect. If I leave it for another minute it happens again. If I leave it for a longer period I can produce the effect two or three times in a row. My uneducated guess is that a charge is building up on the antenna (it is a capacitor plate after all) and touching it causes it to discharge rapidly. Why this should cause a noise I don't know.

I bought a Fender amp after taking my Kees into a large music store and talking with the owner, who was able to talk the talk, so to speak. He explained my options were a Marshall amp (or similar) or a Fender amp (or similar) - the former being primarily suited to electric guitars, and the latter acoustic, and that the latter would be better suited to my needs as it maintained the purity of the theremin tone. No mention was made of keyboard amps at the time, although, revisiting the shop now in my mind's eye, there was an impressive range of guitars, both electric and acoustic, on display, but no keyboards whatsoever, so perhaps he had a slight bias.

I tried both a Marshall and a Fender and the Fender did indeed sound very good with the Kees, while the Marshall was very grungy.

Why do I want a pedal? One feature of the Kees not present on the etherwave is a volume control - (i.e. a knob to attenuate the audio output, rather than a volume antenna tuning knob, although it has one of those too, or course.) This has proved useful in three ways - at anything other than full volume it allows me to use my Fender guitar amp without distortion. At lower volumes I can use my cheapo guitar delay boxes without distortion, and at even lower levels I can use the full extent of the volume field for quiet pieces without having to turn down the volume on the amplifier (which I usually keep at its lowest usable volume anyway.) To the best of my knowledge a low impedance inline volume pedal would perform the same function without requiring me to

[the postman has just arrived with my pedal - back in 5 mins]

OK, I'm back. This discussion is now academic. The answer is yes! It solves all my problems. Even the touching the volume antenna issue mentioned in this posting. Aaah. Now I'm a very happy bunny indeed!

When I jammed with Brucey and Charlie and Susie et al. they teased me about my collection of objects atop the Kees. Said I should have a lucky mascot there as well. I shifted them off the etherwave when I realised there were problems in case that was the cause, but it didn't make any difference. Putting them back doesn't seem to have changed anything. I had to retune the pitch antenna an iota, but other than that no effect so far.

Good point about the DIN connector. Also, at least by UK standards, the on/off switch is upside-down. Still, I love it to bits despite these minor quibbles.

Anyroad up - I'm off to see Pamelia tonight. So I'll sign off now and do my little dance of excited anticipation.

(Oh, and by the way - wasn't I good about not making any jokes about going to Hooters and getting a horn!)

Gordon,

All of the switches over here are upside down by UK standards.

I haven't had trouble with the DIN yet but I am always carefule with it. I made a little mark with a silver marker on both the connector and the back of the instrument so it is easy to line up in the dark.

I had an excellent time last night seeing Pamelia Kurstin play. I sat with Ninki V, right at the front, close enough that we worried about being in her control zone.

So let's talk about her "walking bass." There's no magic trick to it, no strips of aluminium foil or suchlike. This is how it works...

You know the gesture I think of as the "yackety-yak sign" - the person on the other and of the phone is droning on, and to indicate this you roll your eyes upwards and hold your hand up like a swan's beak and snap the fingers up and down against the thumb. Take that gesture but first roll your hand outwards 90 degrees so the forefinger is uppermost, and position your hand at the side of the volume antenna near to the body of the instrument where the field is at its narrowest. Add some wrist movement to increase the speed at which your fingers move and there you have it.

I've just tried it myself... As I'm rather taller than Pamelia my volume antenna is somewhat lower relative to my hand and my fingers longer, so I found a fingers pointing downwards position more workable, with the thumb held out of the way, and rather less wrist action. But for a first attempt a fairly plausible plucked sound ensued.

Some time ago there was a posting to the effect of "wouldn't it be easier just to play a bass?" I apologise for not remembering who posted it, but I have two answers.

1. Look at it the other way around - Perhaps you're a bass player who wants to extend beyond the limitations of your instrument. Well why not consider the theremin - here you have an instrument that can sound like a bass, which is presumably an appropriate sound to the type of music you play, but can change by degrees throughout a tune to sound like a whole variety of other instruments. One might as well say that if the theremin can sound like a human voice wouldn't it be easier to just sing?

2. It's not her only trademark sound. She played two sets. The second was a jazz set, and yes, walking bass is appropriate to that. The first set was layered sound collages, and for that we got a fair amount of her other distinctive voice - the "tape-played-backwards sound." So much so that I joked to Ninki "I wonder what she sounds like played forwards" and "what this needs is a loop of someone saying [i]Number nine, number nine[/i]. "

(Revolution #9 was my first experience of sound collages - when I got home I looked it up in wikipedia and found a link to an mp3 of it played backwards (http://kingtet.com/number9.htm). Very interesting if you like that sort of thing. I do.)

It was good that I had watched the Moog DVD the day before, and heard Lydia Kavina talk about the volume antenna in terms of expression and phrasing. Pamelia is very much about the volume hand (a lot of players seem to focus on the pitch hand and that is what they watch. Pamelia watched the volume hand intently much of the time.) What she brings to the theremin is not only expression and phrasing, but also envelope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSR_envelope) shaping, as evinced by the staccato walking bass, and the "backwards sound" with it's slow attack and fast release.

I'm the guy who said why not just learn the bass. I'm not talking about people who are already familar with theremin experimenting with a bass sound. how many times have we heard "I always wanted to learn the _________, so I thought I'd get a theremin" It's those people I'm referring to. When someone says that I hear "I'm too lazy to spend the time learning how to play ___, but I always heard it was easy to play the theremin."
As a player, I find theremin bass fasinating, as long as you are doing it well and not just playing low notes and saying look at me I'm a bassist. However as a bass player I find it a tiresome gimmick. Worked into a set it's interesting to a point. i have plenty of good bassists playing bass to listen to and not nearly enough good theremins to listen too.
I sit and watch theremin bass all night, but why bother listening to it.
Playing bass comes from the rhythms from your gut. The detachment of playing on theremin just doesn't work for me. To a thereminist, it's like a keyboard playing a theremin sound. It sounds like a theremin, but it ain't
" i always wanted to play the theremin, that's why I got this keyboard.
That being said, it's fun to do. but the only thing in common with bass is he registar.

Andy

I see your point.

Interesting to note that Pamelia did not call it walking bass when I asked her about it (I was badly positioned to see her volume hand at the first show) - "how do you get that plucked sound?" "oh, the staccato..."

Anyhoo. It was interesting to see, and has set me off on some new trains of thought, which is also a good thing. And you're right - a theremin's not a bass, in the same way that when it's played in another style it's not a violin, or a voice, or a clarinet or whatever familiar instrument it's reminiscent of at the time. These are just convenient tags to hang on it.

And of course it didn't really matter what instrument it was - the point was this was a set of some top quality free jazz with three talented exponents of the genre. Of that I'm sure, because it was the first free jazz I've heard that didn't leave me completely cold. Quite the opposite actually. It was constantly inventive (well, 95% of the time), made musical sense and didn't seem at all self-indulgent. Good stuff.

Let's put it like this - I came away with the impression that if you stranded them on the traditional cartoon desert island, within a week or so they would have chopped down the solitary coconut palm, fashioned its various parts into makeshift musical instruments and still be making music that was a joy to hear.

It might be a bit late to post this but i'll post it anyway. It might be possible to build a pitch/midi/CV converter setup in the Clavia Nord Modular. (the digital synthesiser that lets you build pretty much anything from the ground up, be it a synth, a filter or whatever, using analog component modelling.) I found this thread that tells of making a MIDI-CV converter. http://electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=88643#88643

Might be useless or useful info. I don't know :)

Oh and yeah, i've been past the Hooters in Nottingham, you can see it from the train station, hehe :P I didn't realise it was the only one in Britain!