Thereminizer

I watched an interesting promotional video today from electro-harmonix, manufacturer of guitar pedals.

What interested me the most in the video is when they used something silly looking as an input for the expression pedal, they soldered a LDR (light-dependent resistor) to a stereo guitar jack, and it created interesting theremin-ish sliding of sound.

So, of course i wanted in on that action, and after scavenging needed parts from the boxes i have laying around, i created thereminizer (it is popular now to call your instruments something-izer and something-ism, just look at throbbing gristle recently :), oh and i used a mono jack.

Ok, so i made this in a few minutes, it is rather cheap and easy to build, and it would be a shame if you didn't build it yourself.

Does it work? Well yes and no, it worked erratically on my distortion, there was a constant hum, so you couldn't control anything with it. On my delay it was a bit better, since you could control the amount of hum by opening and closing the LDR with the palm of the hand. Yet the most fun thing about this little shit was when i connected it to my kaoss pad. it made swirling noises on filters and lfos, chippy geiger counter like crackles on granularizer (-izer? :) it sounded dubby on delay, and sampling on the kaoss pad enabled me to make layers of sound.

I haven't tried it as an expression pedal. Might do that tomorrow, if i find time.