Achieving a good tone

Hi, all:

I am new to this. I am trying to achieve a warm, cello-like tone with a Moog Etherwave Standard in an effort to attempt and play the inital part of Khatchaturian's Adagio from the Gayane Suite (a heartbreaking, lonely but beautiful piece of music, well-suited to the theremin). Is this mostly a matter of tuning the instrument itself, or the amp +/- effects pedal that it is run through? Does anyone have any suggestions for a combination of settings that would help me get this type of tone?

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

podmo

Turn the Waveform button to about 11 o'clock
and the brightness button between 2 and 3 o'clock.

Adjust the amp for linear frequency response, don't use any effects besides a slight and very decent reverb and you'll get the warm cello-sound.

I'll be darned, Thierry...that worked pretty well. I may fiddle with it some, but as a starting point it does sound cello-ish.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Pod

Cool. Half the job done. To really sell it as cello-like, it'll need a cello-like vibrato and envelope.

That task is in your hands.

[i]Half the job done. To really sell it as a cello, it'll need a cello-like vibrato and envelope.[/i]

Gordon, thank you very much for having added this. I didn't even think of mentioning it. One risks sometimes to suffer from business myopia and so to forget the informational needs of beginners.

BTW: I consider this Adagio from Gayane a piece which is extremely difficult to play well on the Cello and even more on the theremin. It is mostly atonal and thus requires a very good sense of pitch. But I'm ready to be surprised by a performance video on YT coming up in the next days... ;-)

Well, fellas...the vibrato seems to be going OK. I play bottleneck guitar, and that motion for vibrato seems to translate fairly well (however improbable, since it is the opposite hand, and in a completely different plane). I have to confess that I don't even know the meaning of "envelope", Gordon. Any explanation would be greeted with gratitude. There are a few glissandos in the Gayane Adagio that made me think of the theremin, but also a few hammer-on grace notes, which have no theremin counterpart at all, I fear. As such, Thierry, I hope you are not holding your breath for that YouTube performance...it might be a while, a while being measured in rotations about the sun.

Best wishes,

Pod

Sorry. That's a term from the world of synthesisers. One way to think of the theremin is as a simple synth, equipped with an HCO (*) to control the pitch, and a Manual Envelope Shaper to control the loudness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSR_envelope

Here is a lovely example of good use of both the HCO and the MES - in conjunction with the right tone - to turn the theremin into a very convincing Japanese instrument. (I'm not sure quite which one though.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfQenM5LaBI

(*) That's a [i]hand[/i] controlled oscillator, as opposed to a VCO - Voltage Controlled Oscillator.

Gordon, Between the definitions and the YT example, it now makes perfect sense! So envelope is kind of change in volume over time, as would occur when bowing a cello with slightly varying levels of energy, particularly at the beginning and end of a note. Cool.

Pod

A "flat response" may, or may not, produce the sound as closely as you would like depending on the amp/speaker combination you are using.

A guitar amp will give you a different response curve than a keyboard amp or PA system.

In some cases the bass response may be a little too full for emulating a hollow-bodied string instrument such as a cello. At the other end the high frequencies may be a little too harsh. The midrange may be a little thin and could benefit from a little boost.

Provided your amp/speaker combo has at least bass and trebble control, this is something you'll have to experiment with. As the gents above have already said....the rest is up to you.

[edit] You just had to be all the way down in Cincinnati, didn't you? ;-) Jeff in Canton.

Gordon said: “One way to think of the theremin is as a simple synth”

I think a good word for the theremin would be an organic synth. Lev I believe was a master of acoustics. Being that I am not a musician and do not have any of that fancy equipment, there is a way to make a poor mans organic $10 synth. Before I understood how Lev was able to generate Clara’s theremin sound I experimented with all sorts of acoustic mediums.

One method that works well for a cello sound is resonate wood with a bare speaker driven by a theremin output, then pick up the vibrations with a piezo transducer glued to the surface of the wood. Re-amplified the piezo would generate a realistic cello sound with theremin character, natural in every sense. You would need to experiment with combinations to find what works best for you. Think of the speaker as the string of an instrument.

theremin cello sample (http://www.oldtemecula.com/theremin/ultermen/sound/ult5_17.mp3) mp3 208k

Good luck,

Christopher
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