Building a new kind of theremin...

[i]Um, it was not a theremin that was played on "Good Vibrations".
It was a Tannerin - again, completely different instrument.[/i]

Awe yes…What the original poster wanted is a completely different instrument!

To be fair, Chris, he described an Ondes/theremin hybrid, so I think heterodyning is a requisite, which discounts the Tannerin.

O I am just being ornery. (-‘

>I would dearly love to be proved wrong about it being difficult to design a good theremin.

I'm curious, Gordon - what is it that you believe makes the task difficult? What is lacking in existing designs that makes them not good? By "good", do you mean somehow easier to play?

I designed and built a theremin back in the late 1970's when I was in high school. It was stable, linear, and (to my ear) pleasantly rich in harmonic content. I lost interest in trying to master a good playing technique, so it was cannibalized for parts to feed other projects. That was before the Internet was available to the general public, before I was even aware of the theremin being used for any purpose other than as a sci-fi movie backdrop.

Recently I designed and built another one. This one, although quite different in design due to an extra 30 years of experience, is also stable, linear, and pleasant sounding. I built it because I'm interested in developing ways of recording performance data. That is, recording not the audio produced during a performance, but the performer's manipulation of the instrument. That way, I can take the data and play back the performance as-is, transpose to another key, speed it up, slow it down, or even pump the data into an entirely different instrument without losing any of the performance subtleties. Designing the hardware was (by far) the easy part. Translating performance data between instrument types is far more challenging...

[EDIT] - pardon me for hijacking the thread. I'll shut up now and let you guys return to answering the original question. :)

Hello OregonJim,

Everything is easy once you have the answer. Post an .mp3 sound byte of your theremin and that will tell a lot about your ability to design. I am excited to hear what you have. It does not have to be any musical tune, just glide through two or three octaves with a little vibrato and volume control. That is about all I can do myself.

>Post an .mp3 sound byte of your theremin and that will tell a lot about your ability to design.

I'm afraid you missed the whole point. My theremin is designed to capture performance data via a number of CV control points. It has no direct audio output of its own. If I post a sound byte, you would be hearing the sound quality of whatever synthesizer I decide to feed it into.

It would be relatively simple to tack on an audio stage, though. What sort of timbre would you consider appropriate?

Psst! Europe is sleeping right now. lol

I miss the point? There are several opinions that define what a theremin musical instrument should be and this sets it apart from a gestural controller. Your research sounds interesting and I doubt it is an easy path to design from scratch. I threw in the comment about the Electro-Theremin because it violates every rule of theremin design but interesting nothing the less. For me the theremin is about the organic heterodyne voice fully matured, this is what I find interesting about Clara Rockmore’s original sound.

We are giving life to what should have been a good thread.

>For me the theremin is about the organic heterodyne voice fully matured

I can understand how this sort of description can be applied to an instrument made out of wood. However, I cannot stretch my brain far enough to be able to call an electronic oscillator "organic". And how does one fully mature a stream of electrons? I'm afraid that I don't share the ability to romanticize circuitry. :)

I agree, everybody with basic electronic knowledge may buy some components, solder them together and thus build a theremin circuit which will output a kind of signal in the audio range. But this is not creating a music instrument. It is rather like glueing some pre-cut wooden parts together and having something which looks like a violin... but it will never have the sound and the playability of a Stradivari.

If you want to build a good violin, you do not only need basic knowledge but you should have studied lots of good instruments and understood what makes the difference between a Guarneri and a Stradivari. And you should know which design factor(s) and materials are responsible for this difference and you have to be able to reproduce them.

Same thing for a theremin: An instrument which deserves the name of its inventor must be designed and built in the same, that is Leon's spirit: as a classical music instrument (He called it in Russian "Electro-Musicalny Instrument"). So you have to think about pitch range, tone spacing, timbre(s) and tonal character, dynamic range, volume response, etc. etc... all these things are far beyond basic electronic skills. The true music instrument builder is not interested in his instrument producing a sound, he will give it a soul and a voice!

All other devices, be they based on the same principle of operation or not, may be called "gesture controlled tone generator" but not "Theremin".

Just my two cents...

Thierry, I agree pretty much with all you've said. I think you oversimplified my position a bit - there is a big difference between throwing parts together on a board from someone else's schematic, and properly designing a circuit (or collection of circuits) with specific goals in mind, be they musical or otherwise.

>So you have to think about pitch range, tone spacing, timbre(s) and tonal character, dynamic range, volume response, etc. etc... all these things are far beyond basic electronic skills.

Yes, you are absolutely correct - I failed to mention this as an additional requirement. It certainly narrows the field a bit.

However, as for a designer benefitting from being a "proper" musician - I often wonder if that's always a good idea. I know from experience that my pre-conceived notions of how an instrument "should" sound or how it "should" be played have gotten in the way of the creative design process. Most of my better designs (mostly in the analog synth world) have come from chasing down rabbit trails and accidental paths. Heck, the Theremin itself was an accident!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that electronic instruments do not necessarily follow the rules (or carry the baggage) that traditional, acoustic instruments do. I see people projecting traditional concepts on electronic instruments all the time (this whole thread is a case in point). I'm simply pointing out that sometimes it's a good idea to stand back for a moment and view the instrument for what it is - a touchy, VLF radio receiver, rather than a musical enigma wrapped in hype and intrigue. :)