Opening a box with the name Moog on is always a thrill and this time was no exception. Purists will see their Theremin as a complete instrument, but let’s face it, this thing equipped with CV’s has more tricks up it’s sleeve. I had that in mind, a lot, however, I was quickly seduced by the sound and my mind shifted to trying to play some melodies and get the pitch right with my moves. A long time of that went on when my son discovered how fun the Etherwave was, if only for trying to mess my playing 
No longer in control, it was time to reach for some knobs. First thing on was my Lexicon dual effects processor, and what happened was incredible. My standard patch on the Lexicon is one that makes the Voyager sound like a cavernous church organ. It had a mighty effect on the Theremin too. A low volume, the sound was very cavernous, you would turn around the room to hear where it came from. As volume is increased, the sound takes more presence until it’s wrapping you around close. It was phenomenal and i have to do this again real soon, but I wanted some CV work done.
The haunting sound of the Etherwave is reinforced by the difficulty to keep pitch, it’s really an art playing this. However as a controller, it is pretty much straightforward and if you put the pitch aside for a while, you get two full easy to control CV expression…in the air thingies It’s easy to feel the voltage range, which is less critical when applied to Filter, LFO and things like that than it is to pitch.
Set next to the Voyager at just the right distance, playing the keys while swaying the body to the Etherwave on my left side, I had a pretty good Filter control. That was fun. I had to grab the guitar and bass and go through my string-Voyager rig. What a fantastic controller for playing guitar, controlling the filter. Much more natural than a bunch of expression pedals. Control was perfect, even better than I expected from the Moog video.
Back on the Voyager, I had the pitch CV of the Etherwave straight into Voyager’s pitch input with a 3 osc patch, with the KB gate open. Quite a bit to handle trying to keep pitch. Back to the Etherwave sound, I had it’s output processed as external audio, playing the Etherwave normally, but having it through the filter, with expression pedals controlling filter and LFO, just like a guitar. But contrary to a guitar that requires both hands to play, a theremin requires NO hands almost. Back to audio processing. I turned KB gate back ON on the Voyager set to multi-trigger mode, created dramatic envelopes (and all OSC’s volume 0 on the Voyager), so i could play notes on the keyboard and try to match the envelopes playing the Etherwave with left hand, (strong envelopes triggered with each key pressed). That went on for a while (not very convincingly), at which point the CP-251 was brought in for more sound shaping experiments.
The last set up was the coolest of the day and was a bit of a trick to do. The Etherwave pitch CV is send to an FC-300 midi foot controller. This device takes a voltage and translate it as a midi value 0-127 to be sent along with a CC on a midi channel. This midi channel is then sent to a midi-to-cv controller as pitch (notes 0-127) and fed to the Voyager as fixed note CV (already scaled to notes by the cv-midi-cv conversion process). Fine tuning of the scale of the Voyager is achieved by matching the lowest pitch of the Etherwave, and a very high one to CC values, which are programmed into the midi controller as low and high pitch value for the voltage range out of the Etherwave. When everything is set right, you have a fully duophonic instrument, playing the Etherwave, where the accompanying instrument (Voyager OS) plays a fixed pitch version of the melody played on the Etherwave. And just because the controller seemed to beg for it, I did program the controller so that the full Etherwave pitch range is covered by 12 or 16 bass notes, synthesized by the Voyager. A haunting high seamless pitch sound with strong synthesizer bass scaled undertones. That was incredible.
And then something not entirely unexpected (and feared) happened. I had to put this all down to resume some real duties in life. I’ll be back.
Later on : it’s my third time now on the Etherwave, and what I considered a bad pitch pot (blank spot) on this new unit the first two times i used it, now makes me wonder. I would think a pitch pot would control the tuning of the pitch and that’s it. But when I move the pitch knob my hand holding a steady position at the pitch antenna, it does seem like controlling the pitch, but it’s not. It looks as if it’s controlling antenna sensitivity rather. What it does when turning the pitch knob set at 12 o’clock counter clockwise is diminish the distance it takes from the antenna to start emitting it’s lowest pitch. When turning clockwise, close to 1 o’clock, the pitch diminishes with distance farther away from the antenna, and at around 2-3 feet, as you get away from the antenna, the pitch begins to climb up to a point at maximum (and you are getting away from the volume antenna). When in this condition, you have a spot (2 feet away) where you can play the Etherwave up pitch and down pitch (from lowest frequency) my moving the hand on either side. Also, when pitch knob goes beyond 1-2 o’clok, the Etherwave will always emit maximum sound, even when nothing or nobody is close the pitch antenna. Is that how it is supposed to be ? Or is it a bad pot or adjustment?
If the CV volume circuitry is anything like the mods described for the Standard (