Japanese magazine "Otona no Kagaku" (Science for Adults) volume 17 has what appears to be a lengthy article on the theremin featuring Eri. It also includes a kit to build a miniature desktop theremin you can actually play! Check out videos of Masami Takeuchi rocking a demo and Lydia Kavina playing "What Child Is This?".
Dying to try it for yourself? You can buy the issue on eBay for about $30 USD.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuHou8YpLPo
There are also some in stock here... (About a week's worth by current rate of sales.)
http://www.hlj.com/product/GAK04874
[EDIT - now out of stock, on back-order. Within a few minutes of my posting this!]
Rare footage indeed. (thanks schielenkrahe!)
http://otonanokagaku...
http://www.youtube.c... (http://www.youtube.c...)
here (http://vidsearch.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=19135991)
I also note she has posted a video of her trying out (for the first time) a Doepfer modular synth fitted out theremin style with pitch and volume antennas. It appears to have a decent sized control zone. (When I asked Herr Doepfer about the field size he estimated 15cm. I think that estimate could be revised upwards about three-fold, which makes it kind of interesting.) On the down-side Eri's intonation goes off a little on the higher notes, which suggests to me that it is much less linear than her regular instrument - an ePro. here (http://vidsearch.mys...)
http://fr.youtube.co...
The magazine that comes with it suggests some mods. You can put a few photoresistors in series before the speaker, or they supply circuit diagrams to build a pitch and volume theremin out of two Gakkens.
There's a clip of one here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=eh0vdiUAGJ8
Shame he has it tuned with a tiny pitch field and a massive volume field. The link in "about this video" leads to an illustrated walk-through of that and other mods in the magazine. The text is Japanese. This (http://translate.go...[/url) is an auto-translated to English version.
The first mod - adding an aluminium foil earth - is well worth the minimal effort involved.
I find the tone rather harsh - and loud - but the good news is that it is rich in harmonics, and very amenable to a broad range of effects. I have posted another version of my Gakken Theremin Mini video here that illustrates this.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OKN5y49mijs
(I got rather carried away in GarageBand - there are five copies of the original track running in parallel, each with a different selection of effects. Including - shoot me now - [i]pitch correction[/i].)
You can also find copies of my vids on my mySpave video page (http://vids.myspace....) with better audio.
Oh, and plug in the decent speakers - there's some goodness in the bass. :-)
If one isn't snooty about execution in real time, then you might just have rendered all other electronic synthesis systems obsolete.
If one is... well then, you're probably about to.
TIA
Alan
Brian. LOL. Who da man? All your theremins are belong to us! PWNED. Eh-up and ooway the lads!
So I guess the challenge is out now. All you guys with Gakkens! Are you just gonna sit there and let me be the Gakken King, or are you going to show us what can [i]really[/i] be done with a toy theremin and some serious post-production.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
(Oh, wrt real time performance - at the moment latency is the only thing preventing it. I imagine with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of high end effects equipment and someone at the mixing desk it could be done.)
I hope there will be more at that price in a future, people around me are thinking on buying more units...
I have trouble adjusting it, the left pot is like the traditional pitch wheel.
But the right one?
Anyone here knows exactly how to manage both to adjust the theremin?
Thanks!
The left pot tunes the oscillator controlled by the antenna. The right pot tunes the fixed pitch oscillator.
I initially set up my mini by
1. Put the left pot to 12 o'clock - i.e. vertical.
2. Find zero beat with the right pot.
3. Adjust the left pot very slightly to just clockwise of zero beat.
Since then I just do step 3 before playing. You should be able to get a playing field of about 30 to 40 cm with careful tuning.
The tuning is very, very delicate. This is emphasised a lot in the instructions. They say - "just hold the adjusting tool and [i]think[/i] about turning it" !
(This is not the same as I posted on levnet - before anyone points that out - I've been experimenting and this works better.)
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In other Gakken news, I see from a couple of other videos on Eri's mySpace site (http://vids.myspace....) (UFO and Yarawaka Tank) that she has added an articulation regulator (aka kill-switch) to her mini. I have one of those for my etherwave, and it's fun, but for the mini it's a great improvement.
A note to people reading this discussion who might want to buy one: I'd like to point out that it doesn't actually come with a sound out jack, you're expected to use the built in speaker. If you want to add an audio out, you have to buy a jack for it, drill a hole in the cabinet and install the jack, and wire it into the circuit. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you just should know not to expect that as a standard feature. The ones they show in their videos, being used with the tiny external amp, have been modified to add the jack.
Philip