Moog Theremini!

Dewster,

I did something similar. Stood way back when it told me to step away. Seemed to help. Need to try your suggestion.

It's such a nice (in the portable sense) thing if only it could come close to Etherwave linearity so I can use it to practice away from home.

Have you seen it playing an octave higher than it says it is. Mine is doing that. Moog is not sure why.

But they are working on firmware updates. 

Rich

"Have you seen it playing an octave higher than it says it is. Mine is doing that. Moog is not sure why."  - rkram53

I just recorded a A4 and Audition is telling me it is an A5 (880 Hz).

If you set the top note to say A5, does it reach that actual note or not? - As in, is this a system error or just a display error? Perhaps more important, does it reach the actual lowest note its supposed to, or is this note an octave higher?

I've just tested this by sending MIDI CC102 (transpose) to the Theremini. This transposes the sounding pitch up and down ± 63 semitones as expected but without any change to the note displayed by the tuner. So the tuner displays the pitch according to your hand position (as defined in the Note Range setup) and not the actual sounding pitch. The tuner is not affected by changes to root note either.

J

It reaches the note the tuner claims it to be, but the audio pitch is an octave higher than standard musical notation octave numbering (where A4=440Hz).  From what I've read on the web, evidently MIDI octave numbering can differ from standard musical notation octave numbering. 

I'm wondering if they transpose everything up an octave due to the tiny speaker not being able to do bass so well?

I'm also wondering what happens at the MIDI port.  Plugged the Theremini into my XP machine and it claims to have successfully found USB MIDI and audio devices, but I can't seem to access them with any of my older programs.

[EDIT] Found the Theremini MIDI port on my PC using MIDIOX.  The USB MIDI port is inside of the USB audio port?  I'm seeing breath CC 2 being sent for both both antennas, and in the range specified/set in the Theremini menu (7 bits).

By default, MIDIOX was echoing everything back to the Theremini, which locked up the Theremini at one point and I had to power cycle it.

==============

I wonder if the Theremini playing bandwidth is being limited by the presence of MIDI in the Theremini architecture?  It could be that the antenna section spits out MIDI to the synth section.  Standard MIDI takes ~1ms per typical command.  14 bit commands would take a bit longer, and an anti-zippering filter on the synth side would lower the BW quite a bit more.

" From what I've read on the web, evidently MIDI octave numbering can differ from standard musical notation octave numbering. " - Dewster

Yeah, but I think that's now just mostly historical..

If the theremini display specifically shows A4=440 then its giving both the octave standard and the frequency and relating these.. Therefore A3=220, A2=110, A1=55, A0=27.5 and likewise A5 should be 880 etc..

"I'm wondering if they transpose everything up an octave due to the tiny speaker not being able to do bass so well?"

I dont know what the lowest (bass) note you can set is, but whatever it is, that's the lowest note you should be able to attain.. A1 for example doesn't stay A1 if shift it up an octave, and folks (or certainly I) would buy an instrument that can go to say A0, but probably not buy it if it only went to A1 and I intended to use it for bass.

"I wonder if the Theremini playing bandwidth is being limited by the presence of MIDI in the Theremini architecture? "

Surely not !?  I have never seen any MIDI thing that uses MIDI "internally" for system communication - MIDI is way too slow for that task - SPI or I2C or the like internally if needed... But then the newest MIDI synth I have looked at internally is older than 10 years.. Have things gone backwards perhaps?

Fred.

"If the theremini display specifically shows A4=440..."  - FredM

The Theremini LCD display shows A4 (and the like) but doesn't indicate frequency beyond that (i.e. in terms of Hz). 

The lowest bass note the Theremini can do via the control section is C1 (which we all know and love as C2, or 65.543 Hz - I just recorded and measured this in Audition).  One could perhaps lower this pitch with MIDI commands to the synth section but I haven't tried this.

"I have never seen any MIDI thing that uses MIDI "internally" for system communication"

I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if many digital pianos and other keyboards do this.  If the key section has to kick MIDI out, and the synth engine has to take MIDI in, then it's a natural place to partition the internal architecture (as well as the division of labor to implement it).  If they indeed did this within the the Theremini (?) that would go a long way towards explaining the sluggish behavior, as well as the hard controller note limits. 

I haven't done a spreadsheet on it, but it's my strong suspicion that the calibration of procedure of assigning physical field positions to the note range limits should be avoided if some form of linearizing isn't applied first.  Their approach sounds plausible on paper but it fails in practice, and I believe this is because they didn't do their homework re. the actual math involved.  The LC antenna response of any Theremin is only semi-linear if used correctly, and wildly non-linear otherwise.

"I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if many digital pianos and other keyboards do this.  If the key section has to kick MIDI out, and the synth engine has to take MIDI in, then it's a natural place to partition the internal architecture (as well as the division of labor to implement it). " - Dewster

True - And you are right! Now that I think about it, I have seen this done - my AX73 works that way..

But that's it - all other comms is direct from the UI to AMUX or DPOTS except when you recieve MIDI control data from outside.

And its running-status note-on messages.. fast enough at one byte for an on or off message.

"The Theremini LCD display shows A4 (and the like) but doesn't indicate frequency beyond that (i.e. in terms of Hz)."

Looking at the theremini manual (Tuning - Page 18) says A4 = 440.00.. and the text states:

"Normally, the tuning of the Theremini is
set to A4 = 440Hz. However, this can be
changed if you need to play in concert
with another instrument that is not or
cannot be tuned to A4 = 440Hz."

For me, there is a huge difference between the ability to go down to C1 (~32Hz) or only down to C2 - Its at the really low notes that one hears the higher harmonics to their full and gets what synthesizers are all about! - ! want all the way down to C0, and if the speakers cant handle the bass, ones brain still creates it from extrapolating the harmonics.

If the internal speaker rattles or whatever below C2, they should put a HPF before it - at least then one still hears it as bass, even if everything below say 50Hz is cut..

Its a real mystery to me though.. When implementing the tuning menu, surely someone would have noticed a discrepancy ? Or does the display just say A4 and the sound really be A4 in that one set-up procedure? .. And didn't any of the musicians testing the prototype notice that A4 (when selected in some other menu) was an octave higher?

Incredible!

Fred.

"And didn't any of the musicians testing the prototype notice that A4 (when selected in some other menu) was an octave higher?"  - FredM

I get the distinct impression that the Theremini didn't exactly run a gauntlet of hard core musicians before management green-lighted it for mass production.

"This thread is so fun to read.  So much snobbery and outright balderdash!" - SapereAude

Snobbery is subjective..

But "outright balderdash" shouldn't be.

Please detail this outright balderdash, so that it can be looked at and countered if it is, in fact, balderdash.

Leaving out anything subjective like whether one likes the sounds or not, here are the two things which, if not balderdash, probably make the theremini useless as a theremin:

1.) Latency (length of time it takes to convert pitch field changes to audio) - By all accounts, this is abysmal to the point of making the instrument unplayable and unresponsive to usefully controlled vibrato.

Update -> (Now confirmed to be at least 100ms before a pitch catches up with a hand movement!)

Is this balderdash?

2.) Linearity. This is by all accounts worse than many 'toy' and lower cost theremins, and combined with 1 above, forms a barrier to its use for anything other than effects / pads.

Update -> (Now confirmed to be bad - But latency is the issue which makes the theremini UNPLAYABLE, as confirmed by ALL thereminists who have attempted to play it, including Peter Pringle, Kevin Kissinger, Randy George, Thomas Grillo)

Is this balderdash?

By all accounts there are other issues which wont bother the casual user, but which have been raised here - these include that the pitch does not in fact go to C1 as shown in the display and (effectively) stated in the manual, and that the pitch is an octave higher.. And for those wishing to combine the theremini with analogue synthesis, there is the issue of (IMO absurd) deviation from the CV standard.

Are any of these "balderdash"?

I guess that you have never played any E-Field instrument other than the theremini, and in this case, IMO, you have never played a theremin and have no idea about what a real theremin plays like or feels like - so the standards by which you are assessing it and your expectations of it will be similar to someone who has only ever played a Casio VL-Tone calling those who have played a Mini-Moog "snobs" for saying the VL-Tone was a toy.

The theremini is probably a great toy, just as the VL-Tone was - and can probably find some musical application, just as the VL-Tone did.

But if the VL-Tone had been marketed as a "real" synthesiser, Casio would have (rightfully)  been laughed at and/or scorned.

And anyone buying a VL-Tone and believing that it actually was in any way similar to the experience of playing a Mini-Moog would either be happy or be put off synthesisers - if the marketing and packaging had effectively created the delusion that the two were in the a similar class.

And I feel this is a reasonable (if perhaps slightly exaggerated) analogy to the Theremini but not far off - I think -  The playability of the VL-Tone keyboard compared to the playability of the Mini-Moog keyboard is possibly a fair comparison to the playability of a theremini compared to the playability of an EWS, for starters.

But perhaps you can show me where I am wrong, and detail some of this alleged "balderdash".

Fred.