[sdiy] Starting Point?

[Benjamin Tremblay]

I learned this stuff as a kid through trial, error, burned fingers, and Radio Shack.  I never had more than ten or so dollars on hand, so no voltmeter, no breadboard, no spools of wire. I remember building the basic 556 “Atari punk console” circuit and just thinking it made horrible noises nobody would ever want to hear.
After building light-controlled oscillators for a year, I started checking out books at Colorado State University. The ancient books were the best: Musique Concrète and this book written in Spanish from the 1940s showing how a film loop generating optical pulses going into a modulator circuit could be what we call a drum machine. My mother told me about the Telharmonium in Worcester MA she read about in Yankee Magazine. I built a Theremin using an oscillator and an AM radio, and realized it would be easier to master the violin than to get a melody out of a Theremin. Then I found the 1970s books from UCLA on what we now call West Coast Synthesis. When I got to the log tables in the middle of the book I knew I couldn’t follow it; if music was math, music was not for me. 
It took a couple of years of futility to realize I had to try again.
Paia was so inspirational, yet at the same time I felt the kits were full of design compromises that left me in the dark about best practices. (I remember testing the Gnome after my brother put it together and we both thought it was broken; but it was just the T filter doing its crappy T filter thing.)
Then I was gifted a broken Paia Proteus when I was a junior in high school. Fixing that beautiful machine gave me a new appreciation for Paia.

Paia turned me onto Don Lancaster and Craig Anderton (as editor of Electronic Musician). 
After I got my hands on the books by Bryce Ward and Barry Klein, I really wanted to do this stuff, but I had no way to earn a living, and neither the math nor the music.

How long does one have to live before you just start doing what you love? 

Benjamin Tremblay

> On Oct 9, 2020, at 6:53 PM, Benjamin Tremblay via Synth-diy <Synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
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