Sunday Synth Jams: Peter Pringle makes a return appearance with this awesome and bizarre Tuvan Throat Singing & Theremin jam.
Tuvan throat singing involves controlling the shape of the mouth and throat in order to emphasize specific overtones. This creates the effect that the performer is singing two notes at once.
Detail on the performance below.
via copperleaves:
Here is a short improv for Tuvan/Mongolian throat singing (a style known as “khoomei”) and MIDI theremin.
The instrument you see me holding in the video is called a “morin xuur” or “horse fiddle”. It is normally played with a bow but in this composition I pluck the strings and also drum my fingers on it to play rhythmic patterns.
I’m afraid I’m not a particularly good throat singer, but I do enjoy doing it a lot and I greatly admire the Tuvan and Mongolian musicians who are the real masters of it.
The MIDI theremin you see in this video is the Moog MIDI Ethervox.
What a fake… probabely he can do throat singing, but not playing the theremin! At 2:31 the theremin plays something totally different then his hands are moving. .. so it’s playback only
I especially enjoy the parts where his hands are not even moving yet the notes are changing.
I had noticed the same thing with his “Theremin and EHX Talking Machine” video.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks to me like he’s using the theremin simply to control a synth that’s set to play only certain notes in a scale. My guess is that the wavering of notes when he’s not moving his hand is when his hand is right at the point right between two notes and the synth is jumping back and forth between the two.
With that said, it seems obvious to me that he’s not doing any vibrato and the warbling flute sound is created entirely with a synth patch. If that’s what’s going on, then anyone could get up there and create a somewhat interesting tune.
He’s using a MIDI theremin, as noted in the post.
See our previous posts featuring Pringle for examples of more traditional theremin playing:
https://www.synthtopia.com/content/tag/peter-pringle/