Where are you at?

[Cfish]

Where are you at in your own DIY world? We get an idea of each other by our posts, but where are we really at in the projects we love to toil at. A little of how and why we get there could be cool too.

I know there are profiles, but people evolve with there projects. The analog monogamist cheat with digital, and the virtual word people often build hardware.

I hope this brings up some good responses. I will post my mine and see if you all are interested in joining in.

[Cfish]

About 7 years ago I started a mono synth project that is still not done.

A whirlitzer keybed had me wanting it to make noise. I have built 3 descent analog synth instruments off of circuits I chose not to use on my pride and joy one I want in the end.

I have decided the 7 year in project keybed needs an end. Using what I have I'm going to toss together a nice mono synth.

The opifiny is that if I start a modular, I already have Enough built circuits to be almost there. And building modular the fun never has to end.

By the way I happen to be a 43 year old successful high school dropout. I love learning and hated school.

[PHOBoS]

well let's see.

Before I joined this forum I had been playing around with electronics for about 20 years. Starting very simple with some
batteries, small motors and lamps which were replaced with LEDs when I found out they fit perfectly in the holes of LEGO technic .
I was mainly interested in flashing lights and things that beep and I went mostly into the flashing lights direction building stuff
I could use as a DJ for parties, although for the most part that was just me in my bedroom.

I only knew how to make sounds with simple squarewave oscillators but with the internet I discovered circuit bending and
was able to make some different sounds. Through that I stumbled upon this forum and that's when everything went into high gear.
I didn't know anything about synthesizers at the time but it seemed to be THE way to make sounds. So I started building modules
not even knowing what they are normally used for and learned about it along the way. That's also when I started making my own "music".
So I probably came in from a different direction than most people who have been interested in and playing synthesizers before getting
into synth DIY.

The best part was that up untill then electronics was just a lonely hobby that I couldn't share with anyone, but now I was actually
able to talk/read about circuits and share information.
And now, about 6 years later, I am surrounded by devices with knobs, switches, sockets and flashing lights and there is no end
in sight (neither are the walls). I still have a bunch of things to finish up, some might never get finished although I hope I will someday.
But usually new projects emerge before I get to it.

Not sure if this is what you were going for but there you have it, a little bit of background about PHOBoS.


Oh and I always hated school too, don't think I learned lot there. Most of it was just things that didn't interest me and if I want
to know something I will figure it out/look it up myself when I need it. And being on the opposite side of popular didn't make it
any fun either

[AlanP]

In high school in the 90s, I was fascinated with reading about modulars and mostly synth DIY -- I still have the notebook I started with schematics off the 'net. But I got maybe 50 cents a week if I was lucky, so reading was all that happened. (No one in my pokey little town would have had a synthesizer that didn't have "Piano", "Harpsichord", and buttons like that on it.)

Later in the 2000s, when I had a job (and therefore disposable income), I took up guitar. Later on, guitar pedal DIY (I've got a Korg tuner, an Ibanez phaser, and that's about the only pedals I've bought. Second hand, at that.)

Pedals are fun to make, but I've slowed down on those, majorly, and have gone into synth DIY (just like I wanted to in the 90s, but couldn't afford!)

After all, there is really only so many pedals you can chain together, whereas you can have wallfilling monster synths!

[sonic]

When I was 7 or 8 I was given a book for kids on electronics. It had projects for building simple circuits with batteries and bulbs, an electromagnet made with a nail and a coil of copper and so on. I was besotted with it, but persuading mum and dad to buy me components wasn't all that easy for some reason. Maybe they thought I was too young. Around the same time I asked for a synth for Xmas, and they bought me some kind of casiotone thing with bossanova / disco / rock etc rhythms. I enjoyed playing with it, but somehow it wasn't what I had in mind. Ironically I can't get enough of these little keyboards now and have a little collection of them.

I can't quite remember what prompted me to get into synth DIY. It was 5 or 6 years ago, and it began with a LOT of internet reading, especially on the EM forum. I threw myself into it, ordering parts left right and centre, breadboarding 555-based things, and then cmos stuff. I started to build a modular, initially using plywood for panels, and later aluminium, 5U format with banana jacks. I ordered quite a few Thomas Henry PCBs, hunted for used lab bench equipment, investigated and planned all sorts of projects. I also started studying microcontrollers, in particular the TI MSP430.

It was all a bit too much - I was trying to run before I could walk, and attempting way too many things at once. Also, with all the skills required to drill panels, mount pcbs or perfboard, build a case out of wood, I wasn't dedicating enough time to learning the electronics. I borrowed a copy of Art of Electronics from the local library. Pretty soon I realised I was out of my depth. I didn't have the maths or the physics grounding to make proper sense of it all. Finally I just stopped doing any DIY at all. When the hell would I ever be able to finish a modular and actually play music? It seemed it would take years. Distracted, I took up all-grain brewing, acquired some used music gear including an E-MU ultra e6400 sampler and an electronic drumkit. The focus of my projects steered towards writing code, and hooking up midi gear to cobble together some kind of perfect sound generation setup. I wanted to make music in 3 dimensions in my little studio, using all the space, and moving around rather than staring at bank of computer monitors. I eliminated the DAW from my music-making and bought an old Roland midi sequencer.

I started to write patches for the e6400 which operated kind of like a wavetable synth, fading across multiple tiny looped samples, some of them single waveform. This is still ongoing, pending code to process and load up the samples over SCSI.

Last year, spurred on by JovianPyx's activities, I decided to get a Raspberry Pi. I asked Mrs Sonic to buy me me one for Xmas. In the meantime to get back into the DIY I pulled out the Arduino Uno I had bought 5 years previously. It was the first time the soldering iron had been switches on in 2 years. By the time the Pi arrived I was already immersed in a bunch of stuff on the arduino, multiplexing signals from switches and encoders and so on. For now I have a bunch of rotary encoders, controlling values held in memory and displayed on a 7 segment display. The past couple of weeks I have been working through Peter Knight's Auduino granular synth, wrapping my head around the techniques he uses for wave generation on a limited power cpu.

Since the autumn I have acquired my grade 10 maths, and am now working on the grade 11 (only about 25 years late). I've also been studying the C language with renewed fervor. The Pi is still sitting mostly unused while I obsess about squeezing the most I can out of the Arduino. I'm totally enraptured with the DIY again, and looking forward to the exciting possibilities. I'm trying to stay focused on finishing one thing before I move onto the next, but also not get so bogged down in details that progress grinds entirely to a halt. The availability and low cost of digital components such as microcontrollers, displays, accelerometers, wifi-chips and so on seems to me just too good to be true.

I guess my excitement and fanaticism for my hobbies is both a blessing and a curse. It drives me to really immerse myself in projects and complete them to the very best of my ability, but if unchecked it can lead me to take on too much, and then be downcast when nothing ever quite reaches completion! Hopefully I am learning to manage this aspect of my personality a bit!

I have learned an immense amount from the EM community, as well as received a lot of support and friendship. What a great bunch of talented creative people there are here, and what a great spirit of kinship and adventure. In many ways I still feel like a total newbie, but I suspect there may be interesting things to come...

Sorry if this was a bit long!

[elmegil]

In 8th grade (in the 70's) my school acquired a mini computer by Cromemco. We were taught to program it, and along the way I picked up an interest in electronics etc as well. I had some small successes fixing mechanical / electronic devices like cassette tape players etc. under my belt as well.

That was also about the time I started actually listening to music on the radio -- prior to that I'd been following my parents' taste for classical music (including piano lessons) and occasional pop songs in music class at school (e.g. Carpenters music....FWIW). I founds some magazine articles about synthesis (going over typical VCO, waveforms, etc) and my dad said "Oh you want to hear some synthesizer music? We have a couple tapes by Walter Carlos from the columbia tape club..." -- This was of course before Wendy had re-published her work under her name.

It was amazing, the wild sounds, the Bach (which I already liked without the synthesizers), and I dug for more information. Unfortunately this was well before the internet, so useful info was sparse on the ground. My biggest stumbling block was the fact that I had no idea how to make a keyboard; I probably could have gotten some cheap parts from Radio Shack for the rest of it, but I was trained to expect I needed a keyboard, and I hadn't been exposed to anything (knowingly) that did without. I say knowingly -- I loved Dark Side of the Moon, which of course has some classic sequencer based music on it, but I had no idea.

Over the course of high school as an early computer geek I came to believe I ought to do electrical engineering and work on design of the circuits instead of the software. Then I got to college and found that analog circuitry, differential equations, and I didn't get along so well. I did finish my EE degree, but I focused on digital and got a computer sub-specialty. I left school and immediately went to work as a sysadmin, and I didn't touch electronics again for 24 years.....

In the course of a career in IT, first as a sysadmin, then as a support engineer for Sun Microsystems, I came to have a great appreciation for the technical publisher O'Reilly. So when they started publishing a new magazine about techy stuff called "Make magazine" (helping fill a void that had only had Circuit Cellar in it for quite a long time... to my knowledge. In retrospect, Electronotes and other such synth publications were out there, just below my radar), I was all over it. I have a complete set.

One of the things they discussed over and over again were Arduinos. In 2012, I gave in and bought my first one (a Mintduino kit, which is a breadboard version). Casting about for projects, I thought perhaps I'd re-create my senior project which was a MIDI recording/playback "sequencer" (at the time my only exposure to sequencers was in digital keyboards, like the M1). Googling around, I found Thomas Henry's article about the MTS-100 MIDI to CV ... and a lightbulb went off. I had a solution to the problem of how to make a keyboard for a synthesizer -- don't do it, just convert an already made one to drive the analog circuits..... And I had one.

So I ported the MTS-100 over to run on an Arduino, learned a lot along the way, needed oscillators and such to test it with, so I got Analog Synth for the 21st Century and started building circuits from there. And I found this place, and Muffwiggler, and I was (and am) totally hooked.

Fast forward to now, I've built myriad modules, including the Euro Klee, lots of Ian Fritz and Thomas Henry stuff, a few pieces of Ray Wilson's kit including for other people, built my own Eurorack and 5U cases, made friends with case builder and musician and all around great guy Caleb Condit who built me a nice 5U case in return for assistance with his modules, made connections with Synthcube who I've done some documentation, a fair bit of building and troubleshooting for, taken on projects to repair classic synths for other people (I've worked on a Moog Rogue, Yamaha CS keyboards, a PolySix), and generally been hard core for 3 years. I have a couple of development projects on the bench (a couple of them for an embarrassingly long time) and I really want to get into the space of designing and publishing stuff, rather than just building and fixing it, and occasionally making some noises with what I've built.

While I'm still not nearly as rigorous about analog circuits as I ought to be (considering I have a degree in EE), I "get it" a lot better than I did in school --mostly because I have practical circuits to apply ideas to and observe results with. In school it was all very theoretical, the practical side is how I actually learn stuff (and it has always been that way with computers as well).

[sompost]

When I was in school (80s), my school buddy and I would listen to electronic music (Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, ...). He'd bought a monophonic synth (unfortunately, I can't remember which), and I was duly envious, although I wanted to make music, and not just noises, so I rather dreamed of a polysynth. I spent hours in the basements of music stores playing the synths that I knew from the backs of album covers.

Because I could not afford the (poly-)synths that I played, I bought a DIY book (Electronic Pianos und Synthesizers by Hellmuth Tünker) to see if building one would be an option. I also found a way (don't ask me why because I honestly don't remember how you found things pre-internet) to obtain a paper copy of Tim Orr's ETI PolySynth article. Both book and article tought me one important lesson: DIY was way over my head.

Ultimately, I bought a DX7 that I still own. And play. And learn how to program.

In 2007 or so I stumbled across a German synth DIY site and discovered that you can actually build real working synthesizers. After hours of research I bought the MFOS MiniSynth PCB and built my first mono synth. I built several more, but also started buying cheapo/not-so-cheapo synth modules (KORG monotron, Roland JU-06, ...) to mod and/or play.

Being a software guy, I also keep gravitating towards digital circuits (Arduino-ish), but if there's an interesting analog circuit I'm always ready to jump. What I haven't managed so far is to be bitten by the modular bug. Somehow, I'm not really into that, although I enjoy seeing pictures of other people's grand cabinets full of great modules.

At the moment, I enjoy the analog revival (KORG minilogue *drool*) and especially the rebirth of FM synths. And as for DIY projects, I'm currently building a hardware programmer for the DX7, because I still don't really know how to program a DX7.

[Skrog Productions]

Hi
When I was young , like phobos , I loved playing with motors, batteries, leds etc also at high school the tech studies class had Fischer Technik clip together pcb circuits , timers / LDR / logic gates etc .

During my teenage years I was absorbed by thrash/death metal (late 80's onwards), building noise gates for my twin distortion pedals I used for my guitar sound in my old bands live shows.

After a late discovery for me , of virgin years Tangerine Dream albums, and listening to lots of Orbital , warp records & re-visiting early Depeche mode albums I saved up enough to get some recording kit and a couple of synths (bass station keyboard V1 & Korg X5) I started to make my own electronic music in the late 1990's.

My first start with diy synths was in 2000 when I had been looking for a kit synth , I ordered the Paia Fatman , it had a few modds added back then (Thanks Scott G ) , then diy obsession took hold after building a Weird Sound Generator MFOS , then a sound lab , but I was hungry for more , so I planned this big case in 2005 to hold the individual MFOS modules , I decided to go for large format because that was very common (Motm / dot com etc) at the time, I use 100mm wide by 250mm tall single module size.

After using the diy stuff in more of my music , more plywood cases started coming out the shed , Ken stone / Fonik / ian fritz / Thomas Henry / elby spread out into the cases .

Latterly , I have built stuff by hexinverter & Phobos , good pcbs .

I am very happy with the system I have built and it works fab in the melodic music I do and I also found that after completing a diy module there was a strong urge to make a new track in the studio , , I view my blue modular as a required tool for doing my music rather than an untameable electronic beast for exploration of sound , tho exploring sound is great fun too

Dave.

[sonic]

[AlanP]

I like how I can get away with being completely pants on a piano keyboard, and people still say nice things about what they hear with a straight face

[sompost]