IDLE HANDS

I bought a theremin like two months ago or so. After some initial research I ordered a burns theremin, it has two antennas and is resonably priced. It was shipped almost the same day, so that was nice. The package arrived to me a week/ten day’s or so later.

However, the theremin was a lot smaller then I suspected. It was also not very impressed by the power supply that you could not pop out of a connection. It’s stuck inside. The “documentation” consisted of one paper with a warning that you can burn your new theremin if you plugin the theremin directly. very _little_ information about how to change it. A plug would be much better, that way you could just have gone and bought a wall-wart.

So I cut the powercord and replaced the wall-wart with one that should work, and nothing started burning so I guess I did right.

The sound was awful though, nothing like in the videos on the site. Sounded distorted and the pitch was waaaaay of, and uncontrollable. I had it hooked up to a battery-powered speaker. I also tried with another amp, and headphones. It was not until I tried with a guitar amp that I also hooked to the wall that it did not distort. Also touching any of the ground parts of the cable changes the pitch drastically. This makes me suspect that the grounding in the theremin is lousy.

Still it was almost impossible to play, so I looked up all the how-to videos I could on youtube (remember I was on vacation) and I was supries that as a footnote on one of the videos there was info stating that the theremin had to warmup. Why was that information nowhere in the package I got from burns?

After that it was a bit easier to play, and I got the hang of it, but since the theremin is so small your pitch-hand interferes with the volume antenna and vice verse. that sux.

I tried to add a distortion to make the sound more interesting while playing, but since I was barefoot and the little big fuzz is of metal that bad grounding showed it’s ugly face again.

I’m not that impressed with that theremin and I’m going to sell it as soon as I get around taking a few pictures of it. any takers?

At least I managed to make a song with it, because I was scared after watching drag me to hell.

here it is: Mums filibabba lilla Maja (two theremin voices and drums)