I've always been curious, and I pick up some things easily. But my electronics and math backgrounds are absolutely full of holes.ghettosynth wrote: Fri Sep 26, 2025 7:24 pm I don't really know what it's like to come at this without an electronics background
But I did build some kits as a kid, and did electronics projects in place of proper science projects in school. For a 7th grade project I took a Radio Shack speech synthesis chip meant for a talking clock, and attempted to build a Commodore 64 interface for it. (Not successful, but it sort of worked with the test board I'd made...)
Decades of noodling with synths. In the 80s I had a Micromoog, a Commodore 64, and an oscilloscope, and of course a tape player. I built up an intuitive understanding of sound, which only got more robust in the VST era and learning about how the frequency domain and time domain interact, then doing more reading and learning how music theory interacts with the audio spectrum as well.
Being a software developer. I went for an "Information Systems" degree rather than computer science. So the most math I had was high school trigonometry and "Business Calculus" (aka, here's how to solve a couple of problems on a graphing calculator without learning calculus). I never formally studied DSP, but I've read a couple of books and grasped some of it. But in my career in the game industry, and then moving on to working on engineering software, I've done a fair bit with trig and geometry, and those apply to audio.
When I first got into Eurorack I was surprised at how much I still had to learn, which working with VST plugins and simpler analog synths had never prepared me for. For instance, exponential vs linear FM, why thru-zero FM is a big deal, how oscillators actually work, implications of waveshaping, a filter's effects on phase, etc.
now my granddaughters might be getting synths for their birthdays.
