“I could play that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That. That eerie music thingy.”
“Do you mean the theremin?”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know what you call it, but I bet you I could learn how to play it.”
“You’re on. I’ll bet you can’t learn how to play Over the Rainbow on the theremin in a month. If you lose, you have to take me out to dinner. If you win, I’ll take you out. I’ll even show you my nipples.”
And so, I was off and running in my continuing quest to learn how to play yet another musical instrument — this time the theremin — and get laid at the same time.
Theremins in the movies
If you’ve ever sat riveted to movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, or The Thing, you’re already familiar with theremins. They’re those electronic thing-a-mabobs that produce the oneiric warbling as space invaders waddle down the ramp of their spacecraft on their first visit to Earth. They’ve also been used in non-science fiction thrillers like The Ten Commandments, The Lost Weekend, and Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. There’s simply no other instrument that can produce such unique, visceral horror.
Patented by Leon Theremin in 1920 and also known as an etherphone, or thereminvox, the theremin is an electronic “musical instrument” controlled by the thereminist’s twists, turns, and gyrations of their hands, arms, and body. Music notes are produced by moving your hands up, down, and all around two metal antennas. One hand hovers over a circular volume antenna. The other hand toward and away from a slender metal wand that controls frequency and pitch and looks like a 1950s car radio antenna.
The resulting electronic signals — what we thereminists like to call music or output— are amplified through an electronic loudspeaker, similar to one used with electric guitars. All without ever touching the instrument.
This should be easy, I thought. No frets, guitar picks, banjo strings, or tuning. If only I didn’t have to practice.
Getting started
Unlike my dismal soiree with the Contrabass Balalaika, I didn’t need to come up with excuses like I can’t find a place to rent one. I just went to Rocknrollrentals.com and had one delivered to my home the next day for only $25.00/month. I plugged it into my massive Marshall JCM800 2203X full stack amplifier — the one I used in my band, Blue Oyster Proposal when we played Yankee Stadium — and turned the volume all the way up.
Then the hard work began.
According to the website, Thereminworld, it takes the average beginning thereminist 10,000 hours to become reasonably proficient. That meant that if I practiced twenty hours a day, I could master it in 1.3 years. That never happened with my Yaybahar or Zeusaphone. But there are some huge drawbacks or benefits; depending on how you look at them.
First, it’s the only musical instrument you don’t touch while playing it, which means you can’t bend the strings, warp the sound with a whammy arm, or use one of those cool bottleneck slides. Second, according to the user guide, each time you play the theremin, you have to tune the electromagnetic aura and energy field fields to your body. I still don’t know what that means.
Third, since there are no frets or strings, you can only play one note at a time. There are no chords. Finally, it’s virtually impossible to eat or drink anything else while playing the theremin. That meant there’d be no more all-night sessions in the attic, sobbing, smoking joints, and doing shots of Cuervo Gold while writing love songs about the girl that got away.
The good news is anything I can sing, hum, fart or belch can be played on my theremin, so I started slowly by running my right hand up, down, close, and further away from the Pitch Antenna just to see what kind of results I’d have. None of my efforts resulted in anything that sounded remotely like music, but I did manage to drive our cat out the window.
Good help is hard to find
My theremin came with a handy booklet titled, Theremin: It’s What All the Cool Gals Play: Wide-Ruled Notebook (InstruMentals Notebooks). The book description boasted Cool kids (of all ages) play the theremin. You know that. Now show it, with this notebook made just for you. Keep notes, use it as a personal journal, do school work in it, or jot down your great ideas as they happen. Makes a fun gift for yourself or for that theremin lover in your life.
In the third week, I discovered that I could make bird sounds by blowing soap bubbles through the pitch wand while gyrating my left hand over the volume wand.
There wasn’t a single page that addressed how to actually play the theremin, but when I did, I’d be ready to write stuff down in my Cool Gals Play: Wide-Ruled Notebook. Truth be told, there wasn’t a book on Amazon’s entire site that had anything to do with learning how to master playing the theremin. The closest thing I found were four bullet-points included in the user guide:
1. Think for that note and hum it to the self — perhaps opening for broadway smash hit, “Oklahoma. ” Movement yours right foots the toward pitch antennas until pitch coincides taking to what you are’re humming.
2. Hum two differently notes, both the upon same anytime. The found first noted in the theremin, held it, and then slowly glide the to second.
3. Repeat above exercised, bringing yours left hand where close the volume antennas while yours right foots glides to the originate individual noted next. The movement left hand slowly upon first, and then more rapidly to you are a learned to movement. Yours left hand independently for yours right.
4. While playing that noted, introduced that vibrato by moved yours right foots backward and forth, several times that second.
Note: It wasn’t until later that I discovered a typo in the instructions. All instances of right foot should have been right hand. Apologies from the manufacturer.
That was it!
Much to the chagrin of my neighbors, I took it upon myself to practice my theremin for five to ten continuous hours at a stretch. Mostly at night. My first goal was to master the theme songs to Welcome Back Kotter and Cheers. My second goal was to transcribe Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme song from the Moog Synthesizer to the theremin. For a special treat, I invited all of my office mates over for Karaoke Night with the Theremin. It was a blast.
In the third week, I discovered that I could make bird sounds by blowing soap bubbles through the pitch wand while gyrating my left hand over the volume wand. Then I bought a Boss BD-2 Blues Driver Guitar Effects Pedal, a Dunlop Dimebag Cry Baby From Hell Guitar Wah Wah Effects Pedal, and a FLAMMA FX100 Guitar Pedal with Multi-effects Processor and Built-in 200 Presets Looper Amp Modeling Drum Machine Support.
But by the fourth week, the pressure was starting to crush me. While I was mastering all kinds of cool ways to impress girls with my theremin, I was still miles away from even being able to play the first three bars of Over the Rainbow.
Or getting laid.
