[sdiy] Hello, and some questions

[cheater00 .]

Hi John,
welcome to synth-diy! This is a great community and I'm sure you'll
find a lot of help and advice here.

This might be a good point to think about your approach to collecting
information, as there's going to be a LOT of it in electronics.. it's
a whole new world.
Maybe you could find my method of organizing information interesting.
Basically I have one dir called "topics", inside it top level
directories ("electronics", "physics", "computers", "cooking", ...).
Inside each of those I have one more dir (in "electronics" I have
things like "tubes", "tube amps", "power supplies", "impedance",
"current sources and transconductance", "op amps", "work safety", and
so on). Inside those, I save web pages I stumble upon (or even whole
websites) that I find interesting. Especially if I don't have enough
time to read the whole thing at the moment.
I have built up a mood board in a similar way:
http://search.retrosynth.com/synth-diy/search/lookit.cgi?-v1101.10847

Oh, and while we're looking at archives.. don't forget this list has
them! Very useful tool indeed..

On another note, books and resources mentioned in this thread might
well make it into the wiki (is someone perhaps working on the wiki?)

Cheers,
D.

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 3:10 AM, John Ames <commodorejohn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, all! I'm a vintage-computer hobbyist who's been looking at getting
> into homebrew synthesis for a while now after getting a Minimoog VST
> (wish I could afford the real deal!) and especially after acquiring an
> Oberheim polyphonic and getting to play around with real analog
> synthesis. However, I'm a lot less experienced with low-level
> electronics than I am with computing on a hardware-architectural level
> (beyond basic solder-monkey ability,) so a lot of this is pretty new
> territory for me, and this seems like a good place to turn to with
> some questions:
>
> For starters, that low-level electronics thing. Can someone recommend
> me a good getting-started guide to the subject? A reference with a
> focus on audio circuits would be nice, but anything that can give me a
> solid footing would be great. I don't expect that I'll get good
> results if I just start slapping parts together at random :D
>
> Also, some questions about VCOs: I know they have a reputation for
> tuning instability, but I've gathered that it's better now than it
> used to be. Is that just thanks to higher-tolerance parts being
> available at lower costs now, or are newer designs more stable? (Are
> fancy newer parts like tantalum or polymer capacitors any good for
> audio?) What are some good starter designs? I can easily figure out
> how to do a pulse-wave oscillator given a simple sawtooth oscillator,
> but how about a triangle or sine-wave?
>
> Thanks!
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