[sdiy] History of SDIY?

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

I totally disagree with your opening lines. How young are you, Scott? Digital wasn’t considered “vulgar” until after analog peaked, was replaced by digital, and then the cycle started all over again. It’s only in hindsight that digital became considered vulgar, and even then usually only by younger folks who weren’t there when digital was first introduced as an option.

The entire history of electronics started with analog and slowly became digital. The only reason that early synth DIY wasn’t digital is simply because digital electronics weren’t advanced enough to handle synthesis, or accessible to DIY folks. There was no distaste for digital at first, at least not until after things got out of hand and a few decades passed.

The DIY community embraced digital as soon as it became possible for individuals to build digital circuits on their own. Polyphony magazine wrote about digital sequencing in Sep/Oct of 1978. A DIY digital audio delay was covered in May/Jun of 1980. It wasn’t until Feb 1987, after Polyphony had fully transformed into Electronic Musician, that they provided schematics for the Alpha Digital Drum, but that was still before digital was totally considered vulgar (although DX7 fatigue had probably already started by then). In a few of these articles, the authors admitted that digital design was “less interesting” than analog - until they heard what they could do with digital.

I totally agree that digital is considered vulgar now. Even SMD is shunned by the religious. Synthesis has gained tuning stability over several iterations, many of which were analog, hybrid, and then fully digital. Even some of the older analog circuits are preferred over slightly newer analog circuits, now that we have the luxury of perfect tuning when we really need it. At the time, keyboardists were ready to give up a little phatness in exchange for the time saved not tuning their synth repeatedly. It seems that the many incremental improvements to tuning came at the sacrifice of certain tones - once we discovered that we were missing out on particular sounds, folks finally started going back to appreciate what earlier designs offered. Now we have the choice of both, so there’s no need to reject anything wholesale.

Brian


On May 29, 2018, at 8:23 AM, Scott Gravenhorst <music.maker at gte.net> wrote:
> This is tricky.  SDIY started in the days when "digital" was a vulgarity.  It is now accepted by
> most as a viable technique.  We've seen things grow from only through-hole to SMD.  Some SDIY is
> writing code, others is soldered.  I think that SDIY is whatever each of us need it to be.  It is
> simply "Synthesizer Do It Yourself", a definition in 4 words that I personally find sufficient. 
> The last 3 words are pretty easy to nail down, but the first is, well, any darn thing we want.  
> 
> To be honest, one man's music is another man's noise, so there really can't be agreement on even
> what a synthesizer is or is not, needs to doesn't need.  And such an agreement isn't even necessary.
> 
> Ultimately, what SDIY currently is can be found in the archives and it will never cease evolving.
> 
> -- ScottG