This week, I’m putting Diggin’ the Crates on hold to write about a recent construction project of mine. I built an instrument called a theremin. For Christmas, I got a kit made by Moog. I finally got around to building it over the weekend.

What’s a theremin?

From Wikipedia:

The theremin… is one of the earliest fully electronic musical instruments. It was invented by Russian inventor Léon Theremin in 1919, and it is unique in that it was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. The controlling section generally consists of two metal antennas to sense the relative position of the player’s hands. These sensors control audio oscillator(s) for frequency from one hand, and volume from the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.

So basically, a theremin is a box with two antennae coming out of it, and you move your hands in the electromagnetic field generated by each antenna to control pitch and volume.

How did it go?

I have very little experience with electronics assembly. I also tend to eschew the “measure twice, cut once” school of building in favor of the “measure once, swear profusely” alternative. That being the case, I’m as surprised as anyone that the thing actually seems to work very well.

In the kit, I found a pre-assembled wooden box and circuitboard, the two antennae, and assorted screws, wires, and other components. I started by inventorying the parts, and hit an immediate snag: several key components were missing. I resolved to get as far as I could, and then try to get replacement parts from the hardware store. Almost instantly, I hit another snag: I was going to need a soldering iron. I got a cheap one from Radio Shack and dove in. This would be my first soldering experience since a ninth-grade electronics class. I was not optimistic.

The first step was to assemble the front panel. It has four knobs (volume, pitch, waveform, brightness), an audio out jack, and an on/off switch. All of them needed to be wired together and then connected to a ten-wire female connector that would plug into the circuitboard. Eventually, though, I got the thing together (fig. 2) and attached it to the base.

The next step was to assemble the antennae. The pitch antenna is straight, sticking straight up from an L-shaped metal connector that I had to screw into the box. The volume antenna is vaguely loop-shaped, connected through two straight connectors. I got them into place mostly without incident.

Now for the circuitboard. This is where things got tricky. I was missing a set of metal spacers that were supposed to lift the circuitboard away from the surface of the box. I went to Lowe’s, where various trained monkeys in official-looking aprons stared at me as though I was speaking a foreign language when I asked for the part and showed them a picture. Undaunted, I decided to improvise. I bought four small corks, reasoning that I could trim them to the appropriate height, glue them to the box, and screw the circuitboard into them.

Stunningly, this actually worked. I got the circuitboard into place, wired it up to the front panel and the antennae (fig. 3), and held my breath as I plugged it in for testing.

It played perfectly.

What can it do?

At this point, my theremin is more a noisemaker than an instrument. Playing an actual sequence of notes on this thing is incredibly difficult. It came with an instructional DVD, but I have a feeling that long hours of practice are the only way to get the most out of this thing.

But once you get there, the possibilities are intriguing:

© 2008 Evan Mix for Listen In. Some rights reserved.

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