Moog Theremini!

Just a few thoughts after reading everyone's posts:

I have an old steam grill that looks a lot like this theremin but personally I don't care if it looks like a waffle iron or an electric dildo....I would like to know what it actually sounds like. The only videos available are the ones in a noisy exhibition hall demonstrated by people who can't even play the instrument.  I will anxiously await Randy George's assessment.

If Moog really wanted to promote this theremin why don't they at least spend as much time and money on a promotional video as good as the "Polyphonic Theremin" that they produced a few years ago for April Fools Day?  That one had me excited for about 30 seconds!

As far as pitch correction goes doesn't a piano provide this.  I remember taping paper letters on the keys as a child to learn which ones represented the notes of the scale.  It was a useful learning tool and every key is in perfect pitch assuming the piano is in tune.  Does this make it possible to be a pianist?  NO...nor will pitch correction make anyone a thereminist. I feel it is just a gimmick.  For beginners it may be useful and for the rest of us it may even be useful to use instead of a pitch pipe to find a note. However, you can't read music and look for notes at the same time while playing in a fluid manner on a piano or a theremin. For most of us I think a pitch preview would be more useful. So what's the big deal!

Would anyone really be rolling over in their grave?  Maybe Clara would because she spent a lifetime devoting herself to a classic theremin and a classic style of playing.  I think that if Leon was still alive he would be more open to improvements and incarnations of the instrument with available technology.  I doubt he would still be building theremins with tubes.  Bob Moog may be supportive of the Theremini depending on the dynamics of his business.  I doubt he would be working on a replacement for the EW Pro.

Let's wait till we actually get our hands on one of these Martinis...I mean Thereminis before making any final judgements.  If it is as playable as the EWS and sounds as good it will be good for Moog and maybe lead to something more professional again.  If it is a turkey and goes the way of the Gakken it may still be a financial success for the company.

We are all very passionate for our theremin and desperately want to see alternatives to what is available now but we also have to realize that it may never happen.  At least we still have the EWS and coupled with Thierry's ESPE01 or Dewster's YAEWSBM module it is still a very nice sounding and playable instrument for the price!

"Bob Moog may be supportive of the Theremini depending on the dynamics of his business.  I doubt he would be working on a replacement for the EW Pro." - bisem

Speculation about what Bob would be doing, or what he would want to be doing, if he was still with us - Hmmm.. Difficult, and perhaps dangerous / foolish.. But I am a fool! ;-)

I suspect that if Bob had been free to do whatever he wanted with his time, and had not been "trapped" by commercial constraints and partners / shareholders / whatever, we would have seen many more great theremins from Moog.. And if he was here today I think there would have been some heated arguments over the theremini - For one thing, I am almost sure he would have fought the plastic toaster style! That just isnt anything like what Bob would do or allow IMO!

But even the E-Pro was, I think, limited by someone else at Moog - There is a lack of care in its design - not just to reduce cost, but more to rush it to production (the absurd expensive switch mode PSU plonked into it for example - ok, I may be talking out my rear-end here - but I am sure a better suited supply could have been designed and fitted for lower cost).

To me, it looks like Bob lost control of the company long before he left us - I think that, from a commercial perspective, whoever had real control was far better at making the company profitable than Bob ever was or ever could have been.. I think that with this commercial control, AND with Bob's input, things were much more balanced, but still tilted away from creativity a bit..

Now, without Bob, I think the new Moog is moving away from everything he represented -  consultation with musicians replaced probably by consultation with "style" and "marketing" people [as suggested by Dewster]  (with the new target market, theres no need to talk to musicians anymore!) - Plastic replacing wood, digital replacing analogue- and worst, by far - Dishonest or at least questionable inferences being put out, while real data (linearity, latency, quality sound bites and/or video) arent forthcoming.. your "If Moog really wanted to promote this theremin why don't they at least spend as much time and money on a promotional video as good as the "Polyphonic Theremin" that they produced a few years ago for April Fools Day?" puts the issue brilliantly into perspective IMO - The reason I think is that they want to promote the theremini in the least informative way possible.(I really hope I am wrong on this, and that no deliberate mis-information is happening)

"We are all very passionate for our theremin and desperately want to see alternatives to what is available now but we also have to realize that it may never happen.  At least we still have the EWS "

<personal rant now follows-> Yes, there is a lot of passion - If there is any "hero" in my life, and if I was to name one person who influenced my life more than any other - particularly in terms of chosen career, but also on many other levels, it must be Bob Moog.. Not due to theremins, I must add - due to synthesisers.. As a lad of about 12, living in South Africa, I was getting patents of Moogs inventions and articles by him sent to me, and they cost about 3 months pocket money each - I ended up making and selling littl radios just to fund my obsession, LOL ;-) Then I came to the UK with one big trunk - in it was a polyphonic synthesiser I had designed and built while effectively under house arrest in SA - At the newsagent on arrival at Southampton, I picked up a magizine anouncing the Moog polyphonic synthesisers launch - it was far better than what I had in my trunk, and at a lower price than I could have managed! - Soon after settling in the UK I worked as a designer for a London synthesiser manufacturer - always playing "catch up" with the amazing Bob Moog, until (IMO crappy) polyphonic digital synths appeared at low cost and wiped us out - Oh, they were great for replacing EP's and the like, and FM synths did give some great sounds, but they never came close to the richness of free-phase analogue IMO - Wonderful as the DX7 was, even the low-end PolyMoog keyboard was far superior as a synth IMO.

So for me its the kind of passion that goes real deep - irrationally deep.. almost religeous.. LOL ;-) .. Yeah, I know there will be folks on other synth forums reading this and laughing their socks off while taking a break from playing with their software synths on their DAW's - I use these too! ;-) - Some of them are great, but none of them can produce a theremin sound that I could be convinced by even if I control them with a capacitive sensor.. And I cant get as good a lead  "MiniMoog sound"  from any of them as I can get from my real little Moog Prodigy - an instrument which Bob had no involvement with, but which didnt deviate grossly from his ideas - unlike the Theremini appears to.

One can get extremely close to a "theremin sound" using even quite simple analogue synthesis - but I have never managed to get close with any digital synthesis (reasons for this could also be down to getting the data into the engine - my experiments used MIDI and portamento - but comparing analogue and digital synths drivrn in the same way, analogue sounds much more like a theremin than digital)  - I believe its probably possible if the digital synthesis is specifically engineered correctly, but have seen no evidence YET that the theremini is so engineered.

And lastly, it may just be that I am a delusional fool - that I think I can hear a difference, but that if tested under lab conditions it would turn out that I cant - I have tried doing A/B testing of myself, but its impossible.. Id need about 100 samples from real theremins, analogue emulations, and digital emulations - and to not know which was which - then sort them into what I thought they were, and see if I got any statistically valid corrolation or not... I would really love to know, regardless of the results..

Fred. 

"OMG!  Thierry's going digital!  Anyone got a thermocouple down in Hades?  ;-)" - Dewster

Strange days indeed!

Hahaha... I never objected to "digital" in general. I always admitted that I hadn't enough competence in that domain to make useful judging. What counts for me is the evidence: What does give interesting results, not for the engineer but for the musician, and what does not? Thus I had to put my hands on a working digital device like the Open.Theremin and I had to talk to the developer in person to understand which thoughts and intentions he had in mind before having my own opinion.

The musician who plays the instrument does not care about what's inside. He/she will apply other criteria, for example: Does the pitch field feel "organic"? That means can I guess the location of a tone after a few minutes of familiarizing with the field geometry, be it more or less linear? Does the volume circuit allow shaping tones and musical phrases in a consistent way? Is the sound "natural"? That means does the timbre evolve over the pitch range as the human voice or acoustic instruments do, thanks to formants and partial resonances?

It's most time the last question which intrigues me because I rather observe a degradation over le last 90 years. Lev's original designs had this effect in a very noticeable way. Later developments, also by Robert Moog, went more and more away from this. The Moog 91 series sounds uninteresting, not because it isn't true heterodyning, but because the waveforms remain almost unchanged through the whole range. Same for the EPro and even for the tVox tour although the latter is truly heterodyning. I came to the conclusion that heterodyning may help to achieve more organic, natural or musical timbres, but that it was not the only way, since we have heterodyning instruments which sound rather synthetic, too. Thus, non heterodyning instruments may have earned a bad reputation, not for being non heterodyning, but for their embarrassing uniformity of the timbre(s). So, I came to the conclusion that there is a lot to do for "us theremin designers" to give the instruments a truly musical sound like a human voice which changes completely its character when moving from the chest voice to the head voice. And simple wave table synthesis is IMHO just the wrong way.

 OT - Not about the theremini

"If I use wires to extend the antennas, they would have to become rather short to stay within the 50cm limit.
Is it possible to get more horizontal separation between the antennas somehow?" - Gibarian

One possible way is to use extremely fine wires and be sure these are run away from any metalwork of any kind.. The capacitance added by lengthening the wires will be proportional to the thickness of the wires and their location with respect to any ground they couple to.

One can also insert a series capacitor on the board (in series with the wire-antenna) and reduce the value of this if wire / antenna capacitance is too high - this will, however, reduce sensitivity a bit.

Not sure what trimming is available, but it would surprise me if you needed to add a capacitor in series - I would think that if for every doubling of the wire length, you halved its diameter, you will probably be in the right sort of ball-park.

Fred.

" because the waveforms remain almost unchanged through the whole range. " - Thierry

YES! - Ive been saying this for years! - Variation of waveform / harmonics as a function of pitch is, IMO, absolutely essential for an interesting "organic" sound! - And I became more convinced of its importance for theremin sound after examining the RCA waveforms and noting the large change in harmonics as pitch changes, particularly at the bass end.

But I suspect that this isnt the only thing that seperates digital (particularly wavetable) from heterodyning / analogue theremin sound production - A few posts back, I detailed my thoughts on "pitch shift distortion" - I think that pitch 'gliding' is far more prevalent in theremin music, and players can control pitch / vibrato far more with theremins than other instruments - and this, I suspect, makes the natural distortion that occurs to "natural" moving frequencies far more important ..

Couple this distortion with a waveform / harmonics that change as a function of frequency (independant of any movement or dynamic shift of the frequency), and you get extremely complex, but subtle waveforms - you get different harmonics for a note held at say 220Hz to one held at say 440Hz, but you also get variations on these harmonics if you are gliding between 220Hz and 440Hz - harmonics which will not be present if / when you stop at any frequency between 220Hz and 440Hz (when not moving the frequency, the waveform will 'revert' to that determined by its 'static' pitch) - And the charactaristics and depth of the  "moving harmonics" will be dependant on how fast you are gliding between 220Hz and 440Hz.. but as they are generated by distortion of the waveform whos shape is a function of pitch, the result is extremely complex, but also subtle (even at fastest glide, the moving distortion is quite small - probably completely insignificant at higher frequencies)

I think with this combination you probably have all the essential components of a "real" theremin sound. 

Fred.

"One possible way is to use extremely fine wires and be sure these are run away from any metalwork of any kind.. The capacitance added by lengthening the wires will be proportional to the thickness of the wires and their location with respect to any ground they couple to.

One can also insert a series capacitor on the board (in series with the wire-antenna) and reduce the value of this if wire / antenna capacitance is too high - this will, however, reduce sensitivity a bit.

Not sure what trimming is available, but it would surprise me if you needed to add a capacitor in series - I would think that if for every doubling of the wire length, you halved its diameter, you will probably be in the right sort of ball-park." ~ Fred

Thank you! I might give it a try.

GordonC, found something for you: http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/raspberrypi
("Raspberry Pi and realtime, low-latency audio")

A user claims that "With the optimizations described in the article I can achieve system latencies well below 10ms so this opens up possibilities for using the RPi as a real-time effects processor, amp emulator, synth or sampler."

So hooking up a RPi to the Open.Theremin might be an option.

So, basically, you can push a raspberry pi to give a reasonable latency at the cost of a lot of caveats. 

I do understand the desire to keep costs down, and the fun to be found in shoehorning code into a low spec device - after all my first computer was a Jupiter Ace - but, as Thierry says "simple wave table synthesis is IMHO just the wrong way." - I would go further and say that any simple synthesis technique is just a starting point - further processing will be required. Do you really want to use a processor that is pushed to its limits before you start?

"So, basically, you can push a raspberry pi to give a reasonable latency at the cost of a lot of caveats."  - GordonC

A full-blown OS makes all kinds of wonderful things possible and greatly eases development, but it seems you're always fighting them for access to real time.  Kind of strange to be calling 10ms (1/100Hz) "low latency" when the core is clocking ~7 orders of magnitude faster.

OT - Not about the Theremini..

"A full-blown OS makes all kinds of wonderful things possible and greatly eases development, but it seems you're always fighting them for access to real time. " - Dewster

Yes - and I have never understood the reason for this..

Surely it would be possible (simple) to have the OS running entirely seperately from real-time code, with the RT processes taking the highest priority and directly dumping data or whatever to static registers or via DMA or whatever for use by the OS (and from the OS to the RT engine)?

Even back in the DOS days using 8086 processor, I was working with software engineers and we were inplementing TSR routines that handled some fast RT stuff, and passed data to a C program which was running under DOS

.. that was back in the '80s, and it ran fast enough to detect the "cusp" on a solenoid (<10ms for sure). I was more involved with the hardware - but I know they managed it using MASM. ;-)

Fred.

The Open.Theremin UNO instructions say that the total antenna length should be 50cm.
The board is quite small and all the builds I've seen yet are almost as compact as a B3 Standard.

If I use wires to extend the antennas, they would have to become rather short to stay within the 50cm limit.
Is it possible to get more horizontal separation between the antennas somehow?

The O.T could be a ticket to my first Theremin. I already happen to have an Arduino UNO which is currently unused. Incidentally a fresh charge of Open.Theremin UNO boards has been made available to buy just a few days ago! - Gabarian

Gabarian,

I have an Open Theremin and have used antennae longer than 50cm including the connecting wire from the board to the antennae and the connecting wires were nothing special, just single core stranded (insulated).
(See the pic if I can upload it...).
The caps need adjusted according to the setup instructions but the instrument seemed to work fine.

Roy

PS-I don't doubt Fred's suggestions except that I had cobbled my setup together before I knew what I was doing/had Fred's insight!