In honor of our theremin show, I sent away for a cheap build-your-own theremin kit. Now that it has arrived, I will construct it and blog about my progress. Apparently I’ll need to solder things? Anyway, we invite you to build one as well (we know that some of you already have), and tell us about it. Leave a comment or email me at sam radioopensource org.
It looks kinda small… [Samgr / Flickr]
This will become greatness. [Samgr / Flickr]
Wishing you luck with those good vibrations Sam. Who among the ROS team is going to play it for the show? Perhaps, it’ll be integrated into the ROS theme song?
OCP, you beat me to it. I think Sam has to to play the music under Brendan’s Blogger in Chief announcement at 15 after.
(“HI this is BRENDAN I’m the Open Source BLOGGER IN CHIEF. JULIA has written something on the SITE — ALSO! … ).
It’s slightly more melodic than the theme music I think. The percussion’s going to be tough.
It seems very simple, at least from the pictures. How difficult are the instructions? Is it one of those very simple inventions that have big effects on our lives? Well, not as big as the wheel, or fire, but hey, Good Vibrations IS pretty catchy…
as far as more music than just Good Vibrations….check out a band called Fishbone….as well as some early Zepplin stuff…I’ll get back to you with track names.
Let’s also get straight right out of the gate that Good Vibrations did NOT have a proper Theremin in it….it was a thing developed by Paul Tanner (musician in California in the 60′s) that he called an electro-theremin, but really it was a different machine. It utilized a board that a musician could move their finger across in order to produce theremin-like sounds w/ shifts in frequency….but there wasn’t any amplitude adjustment on it.
Track that Zep did that was most famous w/ the theremin was the breakdown in Whole Lotta Love….in the live version on The Song Remains the Same….but he only used pitch and not amplitude adjusters…
Well I think one of the things it’s really most famous for is all the sound effects in those low-budget sci-fi movies… When the alien comes out of the spaceship, what do we hear? A theremin!
I’ll be interested in your comments about its volume. The only Theremin I ever played was in a commercial sound studio and that was a big, big sound. But I wonder what this will sound like. Now get out that solder iron and get movin’!
This one may sound tiny. Here’s an easy mod to try: try skiping the piezo speaker (the large round disk), and wire it from the two points where it’s supposed to go to a 1/4 inch jack, which you can buy almost anywhere, inculding Radio Shack. from there experiement plugping it into amplifers, a guitar or bass amp is a good start, they’re durriable. I have no idea about the strenght of the output, but I’m guessing it may put out only a watt or two, which is about preamp level for an electric musical instrument, and it just might work.