[sdiy] Starting Point?

[Peter Pearson]

While I agree that spending $1k will definitely get you set up, we aren't
all so lucky.  Especially when we're spending money made mowing lawns or
working minimum wage as a youngster.  What I meant was that a quality iron
will really make the biggest improvement.  That plus an "it works fine"
multimeter and a working 20MHz oscilloscope used is almost all you need
(less parts but that's subjective) to do some damage.  Take the price point
down from $1k to something more like $200-$300 or less and that's
attainable for a lot of people.

Something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HicV3Z6XLFA

BUY USED!

You can work up to a $10k oscilloscope or whatever once you *need* one.

On Fri, Oct 9, 2020 at 7:36 PM Benjamin Tremblay via Synth-diy <
synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:

> 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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