Intent
I bought an Empress Zoia off eBay ages ago, intending to use it with my Theremin. Well, since then I've sold my Moog Theremini (though I still have an openTheremin which honestly I liked better anyway) but I kept the Zoia because a) I never had anything with my name on it when I was a kid, and b) my dear metamour has the Eurorack version and it'd be cool if we could jam together.
But my god, is the thing overwhelming to me. There's so much to learn to be able to actually build your own patches, and I feel it really is necessary to build your own if you're going to use it with a Theremin, since the instrument doesn't have a proper onset or envelope (or rather, you are the envelope!).
So, my Week of Patching project is to learn the Zoia from scratch. I'll follow a series of tutorials, and try to make one new thing every day and post it here. Maybe by the end of the week I'll be ready to try to get the openTheremin working with it, though that's an extra layer of complication that might make everything so much worse.
Day 1 - gathering cables
After spending too much time chasing disability-related stuff, I'm feeling pretty dispirited and tired today. I kept the patching simple, just getting things out of the carry case and retracing steps 1-8 of True Cuckoo's ZOIA Mega Tutorial. Pocket operator to audio in, patched to audio out.
Very grateful to my past self for putting all the cables I need for this activity in one place! I forgot that I've actually got the connectors here to plug in the two microphones that are set up at my piano, so that might be a reasonable thing to try to play with this week.
I remember getting quite a bit further along than this before, with at least two pages of glowing lights, so hopefully I'll feel my way back there tomorrow. My old patches are probably still stored here somewhere, but I'm keen to rebuild rather than just review.