[sdiy] Professional magazine for EMI manuf. ?

[Paul Maddox]

Dave/Rich,

> > I always thought it was rather cheesy with Mr Mike 'Home Organ Solo'
> > Beecher at the helm. Their DIY projects always seemed a bit plinky
plonky.
>
> Some of them were, others such as the Spectrum Synthesiser, were not.

who cares?
They made noises, noises from things you built.
As dave says, the SynTom and ilk were good simple projects to get started,
but more than that, they were projects you could use.

> Let's not forget those interviews with Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre,
> Warren Cann (Ultravox), Hans Zimmer et al, everyone of them heavily into
> DiYing stuff.

another good point, some of those interviews were fascinating reading.
Sometimes you even had a bit of a score in there (I'm Still trying to find
the Choronzon score that was published).

> ETI had a few good musical projects such as the ETI PolySynth designed by
> Tim Orr but the content was too diverse because it was a general interest
> electronics magazine.

yeah, exactly, I bough E&MM every month, I only bought ETI when there was
something musical in it.
Who cares about automatic windscreen wiper delay timers when you're into
synths?

> What got me seriously pigged off with ETI was the
> number of errata which appeared, usually a couple of months later. Stuff
> just didn't work as expected.

that was annoying.

> Who's talking about stellar sales? We're only talking about a music mag
for
> DiY folk...

true, but if its to break even, it needs to sell some, at least if its on
paper.

> True. But some of us are still using article printed in 1976 to build our
> ASM-2 synths.

fair point.
Things like Electronotes are still revereared, the technology isn't out of
date, its still valid.
Just now there are a lot more things out there.

> > Meanwhile DIY isn't a huge interest, and a lot of what interest there is
> > has moved into the VST plug-in area. (Where there's a *huge* amount of
> > activity - far more than for hardware DIY.)
>
> Maybe so but I was talking about a mag for hardware people.

I don't think it should be limited to purely hardware (where do draw the
line, for example, is a VIrus hardware or software?).
It would be good to have some techniques/tips for creating DSP code, VSTs
aswell as hardware.
It should be about Synth building, and not just one corner of it.

> > I think it might be viable as a more formal web fanzine version of this
> > list, where people wrote up their latest project in more detail than
they
> > usually do. But it would only work as a free fanzine run with minimal
> > overheads.
>
> OK, that would be a good starting point.

This was why I started the Modulus E-Zine years ago, but I didn't have the
time, or experience, to really go at it then. Now I have more experience,
but less time (Ironic eh?).

> A subscription service might include PCB designs in Orcad or Proteus
format
> for example, software packages d/l'd from the net, software packages for
> blowing into micros or whatever. The possibilities are endless.

yes, thats a good idea.

So, a suggestion, Lets stop talking about it, and do it..
if it works, great, if it bombs, so what, we tried.
I've got a domain taht would be ideal ;- Www.SynthMakers.Net
so, I'll host it for free and lets get some contributers.

Who would like to Contribute and what can you bring to it?

Paul