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<p>Totally agree.</p>
<p>What may not seem so obvious, there's a catch - when you can
afford all the fancy tools you dream of, then suddenly your
creativity drops down the floor. With crappy tools you have to be
more creative and think, imagine, explore, experiment. For example
soldering - you have to learn how to solder anyhow, and cheap
soldering iron is not forgiving, so it will force you to think
what you're doing and be totally aware of what to do in certain
situations. I have bought my first temperature controlled station
about 20 years after I started soldering. Only because of that I
could appreciate it. In case you wonder, yest it's possible to
succesfully solder SMD with transformer soldering gun.<br>
</p>
<p>The scope is essential, I think even more than multimeter, but
today you can buy small toy scopes for below $100. And frankly
they are better than big 50kg scopes I had in school. I have quite
a few of those toy scopes, this is my small addiction, so if you
want to ask about specific model, I probably have that. Don't buy
"best scope you can afford", or "scope planned for the future".
Those times are over. Now there's new scope coming every year,
cheaper and better than others. After 2-3 years you'll know what
to look for, and it will be more GAS hitting than real measurement
needs. <br>
</p>
<p>It is very unpopular point of view here, but I think modern
digital scopes are much better that vintage analog Tek.<br>
</p>
<p>Roman<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">W dniu 2020-10-10 o 01:49, Peter
Pearson pisze:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CA+qbVc-t_fBQG-Mi_-qs8Rzcdci_1VXBT_8XoAw3PTp9+twxUQ@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="ltr">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.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Something like this:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HicV3Z6XLFA"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HicV3Z6XLFA</a><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>BUY USED!</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>You can work up to a $10k oscilloscope or whatever once you
<u>need</u> one.</div>
</div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Oct 9, 2020 at 7:36 PM
Benjamin Tremblay via Synth-diy <<a
href="mailto:synth-diy@synth-diy.org" moz-do-not-send="true">synth-diy@synth-diy.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">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.<br>
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. <br>
It took a couple of years of futility to realize I had to try
again.<br>
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.)<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Paia turned me onto Don Lancaster and Craig Anderton (as
editor of Electronic Musician). <br>
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.<br>
<br>
How long does one have to live before you just start doing
what you love? <br>
<br>
Benjamin Tremblay<br>
<br>
> On Oct 9, 2020, at 6:53 PM, Benjamin Tremblay via
Synth-diy <<a href="mailto:Synth-diy@synth-diy.org"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">Synth-diy@synth-diy.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
> <br>
> <br>
<br>
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</blockquote>
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<br>
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