[sdiy] new guy - how did you start

[Scott Stites]

It all started for me, believe it or not, in the third grade in a little tiny dot
of a town in rural Kansas.  Our school had an assembly in the school gymnasium
(this was around 1973 or so), and the speaker was there to talk about
synthesizers and electronic music.  I don't think he actually had a synthesizer
there, but I do remember recordings that he played, which to my recollection,
were buzzes, squeals and blonks, which makes me think it may have been a
recording of a Buchla?  I was hooked.  My music teacher was fairly progressive,
and she played for us 'Switched on Bach', though the impression that she had of
the process was that things were put on magnetic ink and fed to the synthesizer. 
I'm sure that technique would come as a revelation to Wendy.

Anyway, as I got older, I got into guitars, and through that, got into effects,
and through that, renewed my interest in synthesizers.  My first synth (1980) was
a still-born PAIA Gnome - it never lived to make a single sound other than
'pffft' when it was first turned on (it also had the optional smoke whisp
generator).  I hadn't actually built it - I didn't know what a soldering iron
was, but a friend assured me he did, and went at that poor Gnome with a huge
Weller solder gun.  I still have nightmares.

Time marched on, I got a Korg Poly61, which to me was a marvel - imagine, a
synthesizer that  contained elements that would fill up a whole room with modular
synthesizers!  Of course, the functionality and versatility were made quite
compact, too.  

I entered tech school, discovered breadboards (my experiences with breadboards
were actually good), and I breadboarded an optocoupler driven fuzzbox.  Then I
bought some CEM chips and breadboarded a CEM filter.  Then I got a tech job, put
those things off (because, hey, CEM chips were always going to be around), and
was quite surprised 14 years later when the bug again bit me in a big way, to
find that CEM was extinct.

It was coming across Ray Wilson's page that sparked up the whole thing again, and
I hold him personally responsible - he's nothing more than an enabler =-D.  Later
I discovered Rene Schmitz's page, and JH's, and a host of others, and my life has
never been the same......

Cheers,
Scott

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