Theremins in Popular Music

Theremins in Popular Music
On behalf of ExpertVillage.com my name is Mark, and we’re going to talk about why haven’t I heard of a Theremin? Chances are you have heard a Theremin; they were used extensively in Sci-Fi movies for special sound effects, The Day the Earth Stood Still being one of the more noticeable ones. There are Theremin recordings available, Dr. Samuel Hoffman was one of the great Theremin players of the 50s he did quite a bit of work that’s available, you find it on EBay and on the web. Clara Rockmore, the greatest Theremin player of all times, played a Theremin like a concert violinist would play their instrument and they sound very similar. Theremins have found their way into more contemporary music. Although it’s incorrect technically, good vibrations is often assumed to have a Theremin. A Theremin wasn’t available where someone could play that jump in range, so a modified oscillator was used by Paul Tanner, who is an electronics hobbyist, and he had come up with a device where you turn the knob and he looped that to an aero, then he went along a keyboard and he called that an electro-Theremin. Not to be confused with a real Theremin. Currently you can here Theremins on some of the classic Led Zeppelin pieces and the John Spencer Blues Explosion currently uses a Theremin that I custom built for them that’s identical to the one that we have here. My next generation Theremin isn’t going to be a vacuum tube, it’s going to be much lighter, easier to carry around, it’ll have a few surprise features that I haven’t announced to the world yet. This is a very crude mock up and a physical facsimile of what it will look like as far as the coil placement, the cabinet shape and so forth. I hope to have them in production later this year, but with a lot of other projects I’m not really sure it’s going to happen.