I am a new theremini user/owner and so far very pleased with it. I am on a limited budget, so cant afford a genuine moog modular like the system 55. however, I plan to experiment with using the theremini midi output to manipulate parameters of my arturia (moog) modular v software synth.
most of the said parameters are standard single cc controlled arrangements. I am not sure if the theremini 14 bit pitch output is implemented as two 7 bit cc messages, one for course and one for fine. if so, I could directly assign the two pitch ccs to control the course and fine adjustments for pitch on one of the modular v oscillators. but if the 14 bit pitch comes out as a single, fat 14bit cc this obviously would not work.
any advice, particularly details of how the 14 bit cc is implemented on the theremini, would be welcome.
as ever, theres more than one way to skin a cat, another way to tweak the modular v oscillators is to use a 7 bit pitch cc to control one axis of one of the modular v joysticks, then connecting this to influence the pitch of one of the oscillators. another option would be to use the joystick connection to drive the filter cutoff frequency control on one of the filters.
this is just the beginning, it will take a while for me to try all this out, but the flexibility and connectibility of the arturia modular v synth does seem to offer a lot of scope for sound mangling while using the theremini as a controlling device.
should be fun, I will update this info as I gain experience. it is worth noting that arturia offer free demos of their software synths so anyone interested in trying the same tricks can at least try things out before committing money to it.
regards from dave.
hello again, heres an update to my original post...
I downloaded a free midi monitor program from the internet. on running this, I could see all the midi traffic being sent to the computer by my theremini. sure enough, in 7 bit mode the volume and pitch cc numbers could be seen. but on setting the pitch to 14 bit mode, I could see two cc numbers being sent for pitch, 20 and 52. the default course cc is 20, the fine is always 32 above this, depending on what you set the course to. this is hinted at in the manual but the comment made relates to incoming cc numbers controlling the on board synth. nothing specifically details the layout of 14 bit volume and pitch cc allocations.
connecting up to the the arturia modular was straightforward but had to be done manually as the midi learn option was confused by the amount of midi data being sent by my theremini.
however, while this basically worked, the control over the vco oscillator frequency dial suffered from jitter, it jumped randomly all over the place. simple solution was to use midi throttling. this thins out the midi data being sent by the theremini. the default setting uses a delay of 50ms. I found you could push this up to half a second or more. I set it to 100ms. IT WORKED!!!
I now have much smoother control over the frequency dial on the vco oscillator module on my arturia modularv soft synth.
I now have two enviable tasks ahead...learn to play the theremin properly...and program some interesting presets into my arturia modularv soft synth plugin...
thanks for reading all this, hope it helps someone. midi throttling probably generally applies to several soft synths you may be considering to control using theremini. explore, enjoy and have fun with this great device, which moog have designed to be highly flexible and a joy to play.
