Theremins From Space

Though there were a few notable classical theremin players (most notably virtuoso Clara Rockmore), the theremin inadvertently became the instrument of choice in cheesy ’40s and ’50s alien invasion flicks, usually warbling away with a lot of reverb, evoking faraway worlds. I’m not sure who decided this was what faraway worlds actually sound like, but only time will tell!

If you want to hear the theremin in action, check out www.thereminvox.com, which features a rich collection of audio examples, as well as some fascinating history (Russian inventor Leon Thermin lived a pretty colorful life). Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page used one, somewhat atonally, in “Whole Lotta Love.” The classic alien flick The Day The Earth Stood Still features the theremin, as well as the more recent Tim Burton films Ed Wood and Mars Attacks. What got me into imitating theremins was seeing Portishead’s Adrian Utley playing convincing theremin lines on a Minimoog on their superlative Roseland, NYC Live DVD — check out track one, “Humming.”

For those of us who don’t have the time to explore faraway galaxies or learn a difficult new instrument, let’s make a nifty recreation of the theremin sound using a virtual analog modeling synth. Almost any virtual analog synth will do. The only important requirements are a mono mode and portamento (also known as glide), so we can properly imitate the smoothly-gliding pitches that occur as you move your hands through the air near a real theremin. For this month’s example I used Arturia’s fabulous new Jupiter-8V.

We’ll only need one oscillator, set to a sawtooth waveform. I set it to 8', but depending on your controller, you may need to set it higher; we want our theremin to get pretty screamin’ high! The filter setting is simple yet crucial. Use a 24dB per octave lowpass filter, and set the cutoff about halfway up. Resonance should be about half up as well; enough to have a “honky” horn-type tonality, but not so much that it sounds overly synth-like — listen to the online samples to help fine-tune the settings. Filter envelope and tracking should be turned off. The amplitude envelope (also known as volume) should have a slow attack around 600ms, instant decay, sustain full up, and a pretty quick release, around 50ms.

You’ve probably noticed that things don’t sound very theremin-like yet. Here comes the mojo-voodoo stuff. First we need a bunch of vibrato. Route the low frequency oscillator (LFO) to modulate the oscillator pitch. Select a sine or triangle waveform. Depth should be about a half-step up and down; a good starting speed is around 6.0Hz. Since real thereminists control vibrato by moving their hands like a violinist would, it’s a great idea to assign vibrato speed to a realtime knob on your keyboard controller. Secondly, put the keyboard trigger in “mono” mode (so you play only one note at a time). Select “legato” if possible to prevent envelope retriggering. Now turn up the glide or portamento control so that pitches slowly glide up and down. Not only did I assign the glide speed to a realtime controller, but I assigned the amplitude envelope attack to a knob as well. As you can see, this is a sound that really begs to be played and manipulated, so work those controls for maximum fluidity and realism (or unrealism as the case may be!).

Finally, drench this guy in reverb or delay for full-on alien attack authenticity. Keep that trusty ray gun at your side to fend off pesky alien intruders and I’ll see ya next month!

The file to the right of this article, thereminJup8V.j8e, requires the Arturia Jupiter-8V software synthesizer.