Best sounding Theremin question

"so I'll try putting some distortion pedals in the path while I'm there and see what difference they make" - GordonC

Gordon, any distortion should certainly change the quality of the output - but some will be far more effective than others, and the effect will depend on the pitch of what you are playing and how the TM is set up.. I suppose what I am warning is that, to gain any usable insight, you may be in the shop for quite a while - and if your memory is anything like mine, take written notes!

A lot of distortion is based on clipping, with varying degrees of 'softness' or 'hardness' largely defined by sharpness (slew rate) of the distorter.. These tend to give varying increase primarily in odd harmonics.. the article below shows a useful map of harmonic positions for vowel formants - This mapping IME is quite 'rigid' and the formant positions do not seem to change much, if at all, with the pitch one excites the filter with.

I think this is why I have found non-symetrical pulse waveforms best on my experiments - and these are not a common distortion even for grunge! I played with a circuit quite similar to the Enkelaar distortion, and this gave me the best results - So I would cart your enkelaar to the shop if I was you.. However, I had the advantage of being able to adjust the 2 formants wherever I wanted - I have no idea how the TM operates WRT formant adjustment - it might even have algorythms which generate 'required' harmonics from the input signal ( listening to Peters performance I am inclined to think it must ) in which case everything I have said is probably wrong!

http://www.geofex.com/article_folders/sing-wah/sing-wah.htm

Fred.

Does the TM also have options for simulating a woman's voice rather than a man's? Is there any other pedal that tries to do that?

"Does the TM also have options for simulating a woman's voice rather than a man's? Is there any other pedal that tries to do that?"

My understanding is that formants are more-or-less in the same place (at the same frequencies) regardless of gender - the pitch of a womans voice is higher, and therefore the quantity / strength of harmonics falling within the formant frequencies is likely to be weaker - particularly when singing a vowel which has lower frequency formants, and singing a high note.

My understanding (I am sure I read this somewhere, but cannot locate it) is that soprano's can have a problem when their pitch goes above the lowest formant of the vowel they wish to sing - Most of the energy from the voice depends on 'amplification' from the resonances related to formant.. I believe that some sopranos have learned to shift their F1 + F2 formants to occupy the frequency bands usually 'assigned' to F2 and F3, and this way recover some of the resonance power whilst retaining a recognisable formant 'signature'.

So, as far as I know (based mainly on theory with a bit of experimental - but most of my experiments were at the lower 'male' frequencies) the TM should happily handle both sexes, but, depending on whether the TM has algorythms to transpose the formants at the highest end of the human frequency range, when frequency in could be greater than the first formant frequency, it may / may not be able to cope with extremely high pitched singing.

Fred.

I know what you mean about distortion pedals, Fred. So many damned fuzz, distortion and overdrive pedals it just becomes a blur.

I saw one pedal that stuck in my mind. Apart from the name of it. :-( Instead of clipping the top and bottom of the waveform it altered the shape of the waveform as it crossed zero - it looked like a stylised lightning bolt. Possibly the most unpleasant sound ever intended to come out of an effects pedal. The unique selling point was that it the unpleasantness could pass through various other effects pedals without being diminished. 

"The unique selling point was that it the unpleasantness could pass through various other effects pedals without being diminished..." ROFLMAO !

Direct connection to mains also does that trick! ;-)   ... for a few painful moments.

"I saw one pedal that stuck in my mind. Apart from the name of it. :-( Instead of clipping the top and bottom of the waveform it altered the shape of the waveform as it crossed zero - it looked like a stylised lightning bolt. Possibly the most unpleasant sound ever intended to come out of an effects pedal"

Yes, crossover distortion.  It sounds pretty bad to me too, though applied to some synth sounds it sometimes works.

Ah, thank you. "crossover distortion" That was the key phrase I needed. It was the Z-Vex Machine. Now that I hear it again it wasn't quite as nasty as I remembered. But still nasty. I really want to try it on my theremin! Sadly the shop I'm visiting doesn't carry Z-Vex.

Here's some info about it.
http://tagboardeffects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/zvex-machine.html

AIKhwarizmi: "Does the TM also have options for simulating a woman's voice rather than a man's? Is there any other pedal that tries to do that?"

FredM is right. The effect itself is gender-neutral. Everything depends on the register in which you are playing. If you play in the soprano range the Talking Machine will not sound like a tenor. The only formant that I have found useful for the kind of thing I do is the open "AH". The others are all a little bit clownish. 

We usually hear Rachmaninoff's VOCALISE played on the theremin in the soprano register. Here it is as a tenor:

http://www.peterpringle.com/music/tmvocalise.mp3

That's really impressive... it sounds wonderful!

I have just decided that I'm going to save some money and buy a TM. Curiously my reverb pedal and a borrowed EQ pedal that I'm using are also by EHX, I'm going to look like a brand fan!

If a pedal designed for guitars can do such interesting things with the sound of the theremin, I wonder if someone could make it even better by designing a circuit on similar principles but tuned specifically to theremins.

OK, I own an EHX Talking Machine. Don't expect any sound samples soon - there's a lot to explore, and a lot of figuring out how to incorporate it into what I do. And certainly don't expect me to sound like an opera singer! The Talking Machine is only a small but necessary part of that. Playing the theremin with opera singer phrasing and style is the more significant part of it, and that is a skill I neither have nor want. 

As we predicted, it sounds OK with the etherwave, and a lot better with some distortion in the effects chain. I started with a Boss DS-1 which is their best-seller and an inexpensive basic distortion unit. That took the sound from OK to good. (All in my incredibly biased opinion, of course.) The one that I chose in the end was a ModTone BuzzBoy power fuzz. With the Talking Machine turned off and appropriate settings throughout, the BuzzBoy made my etherwave sound reminiscent of the Goldberg RCA without the Talking Machine - which in this instance is a good thing - and with the Talking Machine turned on the formant filter effect was greatly enhanced. It gave me a big dose of that "this is the one for me (*)" feeling. :-)

I didn't get the Freeze. I liked it, but it felt a bit limited - I could imagine ways to use it, but not with the effects pedals I currently possess. Also they were waiting for availability of the EHX Superego - which does what the Freeze does and more. So maybe when my budget has recovered...

(*) But not necessarily for you. Find one that sounds right for you.