Playing the D-Lev Digital Theremin

Here are a few more D-Lev demos from the same session.  Today's render color is purple.

Danny Boy - Strings preset

Somewhere Over the Rainbow - Strings preset

When You Wish Upon a Star - Male Vocal preset

Sounds good to me. However my taste in such things is not universally regarded :-)

"Here are a few more D-Lev demos from the same session."  - pitts8rh

You must have been in that studio all day and all night (just changing the drapes)!  Quite nice work all around!

And with a wave of the hands, the curtains are changed to green!

Titanic Movie Intro - Flutey preset

Roger, great "flutey" voice and excellent playing!  I'm unfamiliar with that piece but I like what you do with it.

Speaking generally of "fluety" and not critically of your voice - I'm prolly doin' it rong, but I've found it really difficult to integrate noise type incidental sound into just about any tonal voice on the D-Lev.  If I can hear it, it usually sounds canned and too automatic, so I turn it down to where I can't hear it, and then what's the point?  Putting some -Pmod on it sometimes helps, as excitation sounds are often more pronounced at lower pitches, where the tonal output and body resonances aren't able to completely dominate.  Low Q 2nd or 4th order LP or BP filtering it often helps it blend in too, though having that filter track too much with the pitch can make it meow (love that technical term you invented!).

I'm wearing headphones listening to this and I'm hearing left and right stereo image movement with volume changes.  Could that be your reverb doing that, or possibly the YouTube re-encode?  Or maybe it's Linux Mint (I've been installing (and uninstalling) several audio packages).

Eric,

I have a little noise in there as you probably hear, and you're right; I can't find any way of really making it sound good as genuine wind noise for an instrumental.  I should have taken it out, but nevertheless, there it is.  It does make a great "winter cabin" effect in other presets, though.

Re: the flutey sound...alright, now you've gone too far!  I never expected this to undergo headphone scrutiny, because I'm only mixing on computer speakers with Vegas video editing software.  To do this properly I would do the audio on my other computer with Sonar/Cakewalk and decent speakers, and where I have some better plugins, particularly for reverb.

But to answer your question about the left/right, it's intentional although crudely done here.  I usually do something like this with guitar for mono audio center pickup when I want to add a little spread.  I duplicate the mono channel, pan one left and the other right, and then add a compressor and mono reverb to each side.  The compressor threshold and ratio on each side are set slightly differently, and the reverbs for each side are set to different levels. Having separate reverbs is a terrible thing to do, but I did it. For guitar I have often added some different EQ on the left and right to add some separation, followed by a more proper single stereo reverb.

I basically don't know what I'm doing, and what you're hearing in headphones might sound pretty horrifying. But I some case I have found good results with 12-string guitar.  For these theremin videos I'm just hacking away with way too much cloudy reverb in some cases, but I'm trying to get something out fast. 

"I never expected this to undergo headphone scrutiny..."  - pitts8rh

Yah, headphones can be overly revealing, particularly with the stereo imaging.  I've found carefully chosen low-end headphones often blow away higher end speakers, which is good because I usually have to listen privately (I love, Love, LOVE my audio-technica ATH AD700's).

"I duplicate the mono channel, pan one left and the other right, and then add a compressor and mono reverb to each side.  The compressor threshold and ratio on each side are set slightly differently, and the reverbs for each side are set to different levels. Having separate reverbs is a terrible thing to do, but I did it."

The pseudo-stereo mode of the inharmonic resonator (in the newer D-Lev SW) is good for this sort of thing, and I find myself doing all my patches in "stereo" now as it adds to the listening experience during practice / voice editing, though if applied too heavily it can give right / left issues too.  You can probably get higher quality pseudo-stereo from any decent reverb unit (which are designed specifically with this scenario in mind).

Yep.  The Sonitus reverb plugin that I used just seems weird.  I have a much better Lexicon Pantheon plugin for Cakewalk and older  Lexicon LR15, Alesis Wedge, and Behringer V-Verb hardware reverbs to choose from.  I really had no excuse except laziness.

"I really had no excuse except laziness."  - pitts8rh

Works for me, that's the best of all possible excuses! :-) 

I've got a first edition V-Verb in the spare room, along with a Roland SRV-3030 that never did much more than gather dust.  Much easier just to apply whatever lamer reverb plugin there is on hand in Audacity or Audition or whatever.

This flutey sound is great! It can be wonderfully guessed what high potential is still in this theremin development.