Kuriosities

City Lights (final scene, Charlie Chaplin)

Just as I was getting ready to go out to my guitar lesson today my theremin arrived! Oh! I was so excited – I have been meaning to buy a theremin kit for many weeks now, months even, and finally bought one off of Ebay. (This is where I got mine…) They range so much in price, depending on what quality you are looking for. I just wanted one to play around with for a bit to see if I liked it, so I bought a cheapomatic version with just one antenna for tone.

What is a theremin? You can read about them on Wiki, but basically they are an electronic musical instrument that has an antenna. You control it by moving your hand closer and further away from the antenna, but without actually touching anything. It changes tone depending on your hand’s proximity, and makes terrible haunting, and as I discovered, screeching noises.

It was very tiny, so I popped the kit into my purse and brought it along to my lessons where I showed my excited teacher the wondrous bit of circuitry and wires. We looked over the instructions hastily without paying much attention to them, and started plugging things together, and then hooked it with a great deal of anticipation, into his amp. We were like kids on Christmas morning. What now, what now?!!

It started growling at us like an angry cat about to leap with its claws extended. Really, it was the most horrible skin crawling sound. The closer we got to it, the angrier it sounded. We would move our hands close, it would screech and we would jump back and laugh at ourselves, it sounding like it would eat us up for dinner. At one point, the antenna fell over and we had to touch it. Holy smokes. The noise it made, I’ve never been so frightened to pick something up – it sounded like it had just travelled here from the outer realms of hell.

At some point he managed to make it sing a horrific, spine tingling version of Happy Birthday, as we giggled. And then we hooked it into his mixer for guitar sounds and made it make all sorts of otherworldly and awful sounds. It is a wonderfully horrible device. I will be taking the battery out of it before going to bed, that is for certain. It sounds and feels like it taps into some other dimension…and not one that is pleasant.

So now, I have the task of making a proper house for it. I am thinking some Victorian, cherry stained box with a crank handle, somewhat resembling an old organ grinder. We’ll see how it goes… but it most definitely requires something suitably sombre, distressed and overall creepy, to contain it. After that, I will set about trying to make it make sounds that actually resemble some sort of music, and not quite so (although perhaps a little) demonic.

I will take and post pics of the inner workings tomorrow, when there is proper light, and will update as I go in making the cabinet.

Some nifty theremin links:

Gnarls Barkley Crazy Theremin Jam (how a theremin can sound if you know what to do…)

Mother, A Word That Means The World to Me …we call this guy the theremin guy, he is so erm….intense… about his theremin playing. But he can truly play, and has some lessons too, so despite the ah…intensity… I’ll be watching them to see what I can learn.