Moog Music introduces the Theremini, an affordable, easy to play theremin

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Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Moog_Theremini_2014Asheville’s Moog Music Inc. recently unveiled a pretty amazing update to one of its iconic instruments, the theremin. In California at the annual NAMM Show, one of the largest music product trade shows in the world, Moog Music made a splash with its Theremini.

The big innovation with the Theremini is built-in pitch control, which makes it impossible to play a wrong note on the theremin, which is a notoriously difficult instrument to play. From Gizmodo.com:

The Theremin is difficult to play because rather than touch it, you wave your arms in front of the thing interrupting the electromagnetic field that’s emanating from a pair of antennae; your proximity to each determines the sound. In the customary arrangement, the vertical antenna on the right controls pitch and the looped horizontal antenna on the left controls volume. Nailing pitch is really difficult. People who really know what they’re doing move their hands with the precision of a concert violinist. The rest of us wave our arms in the air like a bunch of fools.

The $320 Theremini solves this problem with an adjustable pitch control knob, which corrects the sound you’re trying to play from zero to 100 percent. At zero, it doesn’t correct the sound at all, but at 100, the instrument will only play the notes within the scale you’ve selected.

Great for beginners! But it kind of takes the fun out of an instrument that gets its charm from the imperfections of the output.

A lot of folks are also commenting on the flying saucer styling of the new Theremini. I can’t wait to check it out.

 

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Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

  • 1

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