August 2009

Turning the Theremin Vision II into a real Theremin

August 26, 2009

When I first got into making Theremins I ordered the Theremin Vision kit. I had a hard time getting it to work at first, but finally got it running OK. At the moment I only seem to get about 12″ of usuable range. My reference oscillator runs at about 1.67MHz and the sensor oscillator is [...]

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Don’t leave your Theremin in the sun all day…

August 25, 2009

Did the Sam Ash MIDI clinic last night, and learned one valuable lesson about the Theremin. If you leave it in your car, in the sun, it don’t work no more… Had to take off the lid and leave it for about an hour to cool down so that the coils dropped back into tune.

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Experimental MIDI Interface for a Theremin

August 23, 2009

I recently got off my butt and finished the case and MIDI interface for the Theremax. This video shows how bad I am at playing the Theremin. The first clip shows the continuous mode where the pitch antenna is controlling the pitch bend wheel. The second shows a more discrete approach, with a blues like [...]

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Music From Outer Space and Tonepad

August 16, 2009

I am seriously hooked on building my own synths and effects now. The modular approach to sound design is really engaging, and the fact that I have to build the modules myself means that I’m willing to invest much more time in using them than some of the modern digital gear. I found a great [...]

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The PAiA Vocoder

August 16, 2009

I just completed testing on my build of the PAiA Vocoder kit. This was a tough one, and officially I’m not done yet, as I have to get the noise reduction mod fitted and working. Here’s a video that explains a good testing strategy once completed… …and here’s a video that demonstrates what the Vocoder [...]

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Stars

August 14, 2009

I finally found a place just south of Indianapolis near Edinburgh where the light pollution was low enough to get this shot of the Milky Way – I’m assuming it’s the Milky Way and not just some really high clouds. It was a 30 second exposure at F2.8 with a fish-eye lens. I used the [...]

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WordPress out of memory error

August 13, 2009

Hmmmm, so after a long period of flawless service, my copy of WordPress has started to run out of memory. When I try to upload images I get “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2144 bytes) in /blog/wp-admin/includes/image.php on line 147″ It looks like the amount of memory allocated [...]

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Test patch for the PAiA 9700s synth

August 3, 2009

After I finished the 9700 I was looking for a way to test it as a whole. The one thing missing from the PAiA website was a test patch with a sound file, so that you can check to see if all the bits are doing what they should. I think that my synth is [...]

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They were on sale!

August 3, 2009

I bough 15 dollars worth of stuff from Walmart the other day, just so I could make one of these: I got the idea from the excellent http://www.cibomahto.com/ website. Keeps me entertained for hours, but then I’m that kind of person…

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PAiA Theremax driving a 9700s Analog Modular Synth

August 2, 2009

I just spent about a week building the 9700s modular synth. It took a bit longer than anticipated – but these things really can’t be rushed. I now know why analog synth gear costs so much – it takes forever to assemble! I hooked up the Theremax theremin to the CV of the VCO just [...]

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