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RE: Minnesota

in case anyone is interested, Dale is playing a Roland Hand Sonic HPD-15,
one of the best electronic hand percussion
instruments I've ever used. It has this great D-Beam controller on it,
which, unlike the Theremin, works from some infrared assembly.

Don, I'm sure you know all about this, but i thought that everyone else
might be interested in this tidbit.

<snip>

The Theremin is played by moving one's hands near two large metal antennas.
One antenna controls volume (moving closer to the volume antenna softens the
sound), and the other controls pitch (moving closer to the pitch antenna
increases the pitch).

The basic principle behind the Theremin is known as heterodyning - the
mixing of two signals of different frequencies and extracting their
difference. The pitch circuit of the Theremin uses two radio-frequency
oscillators, one fixed and one variable, to create this effect. Moving the
hands near the pitch antenna changes the speed of the variable oscillator,
and the difference between the two comes out as a musical note. The volume
circuit works in a similar manner. Most Theremin have a range of 3-5
octaves.

The original Theremin were built using vacuum tubes. In 1961, Robert Moog
published one of the very first transistorized Theremin schematics in
Electronics World Magazine. Some modern Theremin use hybrid digital/analog
electronics and some even include MIDI output!

</snip>

There is this guy that I'm doing some session work with this weekend, Robert
Deeble, his guitarist plays a Theremin like a violin. Very fun, but hard to
play, since your are pretty much determining the pitch by ear and judging
where your hand needs to go in the air.



::chris::



more information at http://216.133.225.74/PRODUCTS/hardware/hpd15.htm



It was in-frikkin-credible.  Linford turned on this little gizmo that played
the looped percussion, and Karin sang/breathed the first verse.  Then,
somewhere in the middle, the other band members trickled onstage and started
weaving their sounds into the mix.  It was like the old If I'm Drowning,
only
in reverse.  Jack was playing some wild, wailing sounds on the lap guitar
with
a slider, and Dale had that weird theremin-like drum machine.  It went from
a
very sparse, elegant mantra to this complex, intricate symphony of unusual
sound, maintaining a continuity of theme throughout.  Just breathtaking.

--
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu        http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"Standing on a well-chilled cinder we see the fading of the suns and try
to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
				     - Georges Lematre


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