So how did you guys initially learn about electronics?

Do most of you have formal training?

Did you teach yourself?

Do you need to have had formal training to produce your own electronics for sale? (eg. Original Designs?)

Im currently Studying Composition and Production at University. This gives me the opportunity to study 36credit points of external stubjects (almost a full year of studying what ever i want spread across the 3 year course). Im thinking of learning the fundamentals of electronics in an electrical engineering degree. I'll have to do a maths course but after that i should be able to do the fundamental physics and theory behind electronics.

I want a back up to a music career. Do you think this would be beneficial, or do you think i should just take it on myself? i have do about 8 hours travel a week so reading is most possible without interrupting anything.


Oh and i'm about to take on an SSL clone as my first DIY after a few amp repairs and what not...

no formal training for me - i know i know hard to beleive right :green: I'm from a traditional graph design background and only started all things DIY a few years back with the midibox sid project from ucapps...made a few more boxes from midibox, then found tt which is now this drum...and the analog ride began

Oh, and I can't big up that GSSL enuff either - great project to do!

Saw my first Moog modular in a shop when I was a kid and thought: "I'LL HAVE SOME OF THAT!" But couldn't afford one so I taught myself how to build one. Then a music shop owner saw me fix my CS-80 when it was bust, just after I left school and offered me a job in his tech shop. Soon bands were asking me to go on tour with them as keyboard tech, amd then to run their studios, and every step of the way I had my nose buried in books learning everything I could. It wasn't until I found myself stripping a synthesiser on the dressing room floor between songs during a show at Yokahama Stadium that I suddenly realized that I really have no formal qualifications to do any of this stuff, and for a moment I felt like some kind of impostor, but I am still doing it, and no-ones complaining.

currently getting my EE degree at Universoty of California at Santa Barbara... but drinking too much beer.. :guinness:

I figure that if I have my EE, I can do any amount of DI + studioo work, or just get a nice cushy job in industry...

Ian

[quote author="Ian MacGregor"]currently getting my EE degree at Universoty of California at Santa Barbara... but drinking too much beer.. :guinness:

I figure that if I have my EE, I can do any amount of DI + studioo work, or just get a nice cushy job in industry...

Ian[/quote]

thanks what im starting to think... maybe if i put my head down i can knock over 2 degrees in the next 3 degrees...

sure it'll be hard work but atleast i would have covered some bases...

[quote author="Sammas"]Do most of you have formal training?[/quote]
I have a bit. Electronics HTX (won't make sense to non-danes) and some electronics classes at university.

Did you teach yourself?

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Yes, also that. You have to do that no matter what formal training you have.

Do you need to have had formal training to produce your own electronics for sale? (eg. Original Designs?)

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No. You "just" have to make something others want to buy...

Best regards,

Mikkel C. Simonsen

I'm a newbie and have been doing electronics for just over a year now. I did a traineeship but learnt more about audio electronics talking to Kev on the phone. Lucky me :grin: :grin: :thumb:

I found the formal training enabled me to talk to Kev.
But I knew nothing and I still don't really.

even with a degree in electronics - you still come out of uni with no idea how things are done in the real world

even with a degree in electronics - you still come out of uni with no idea how things are done in the real world

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I totally agree with that

I study electronic engineer and I feel that without internet I´m lost .I learn more here that on the class , well forums are more oriented to my tastes.

My father and grandfather were both electronics technicians, so I've been exposed to this stuff from an early age. I'm still learning something new almost every day, though.

[quote author="Rochey"]even with a degree in electronics - you still come out of uni with no idea how things are done in the real world [/quote]

Absolutely. It always surprises me how 90% of the other kids in my EE classes seem to have no clue or shred of hands on experience. College gives you the skills to learn, whether you learn a lot or a little is up to you. The Lab is indispensible in my EE education.

Ian

I dont have any formal training at all and am entirely self taught which would explain why I am such a retard. I saw a fuzzface for sale for $350 when I was in college, the battery was dead at the store, so I watched the guy open it up and put a new one in and saw the circuitboard and was luck, fuck, I dont know how, but that doesnt look hard to build, and it wasnt. Since then, Ive basically just built stuff as I needed it for my studio, but it really started with stomp boxes, I always built stuff because I couldnt *find* the real thing to buy, and still basically stick to that creed. I learned everything I know from helpful people on the internet and would be either helpless, or way more experimental, cant decide which, without places like this.

dave

I started at the age of 13 the traditional way: with a crystal radio receiver and ´progressed to 2 transistor radio D.I.Y kit made in East Germany. That was in about 1964 or 65 while i still lived in Poland. A year or so later a friend got hold of a Vox Wah-wah and a Marshall Supafuzz and obviously we had to copy those things. We had a friend whose father worked for a military factory so he made diecast aluminium copies of the metal cases and also got us a bag of russian transistors. We used record/play heads from a 2track tape recorder for the inductor in the wah-wah which we bought from a shop selling surplus, or rather stuff that didn't pass quality control in polish factories that were subcontracted for manufacturing by western companies. I have to say we made quite nice money knocking of wah-wahs and fuzzes, i think we made about 100 of them. That was all illegal production and we never got caught by the authorities. I left Poland in 1969 and settled in Sweden where i got my formal education. University almost killed my creativity but i manged to recover from that. And so it goes on....

No formal training here..Hmmm I have a very good friend ( a formal trained EE) whom I ask a lot of questions when even I´m in need of that..Most of what I know is from "learning by doing"..I also learn from time to time from more "vice" people around here..although I must say most around here is about stuff I do not care to much about in the first place..*S* (all the cloning that is) ;-)..*S*

Kind regards

Peter

Never had one lesson..... which puts me in the retard camp too :grin:

It's good to know that with help, even those with an itty bitty living space can be productive members of the DIY society :green:

ju

I managed to drop out of a HNC in electronics, bearing in mind the current state of the music industry I wish I'd finished it... Not so much that I would go and join another electronics sector, but from a point of view of knowing I had options giving me a safety blanket if things deteriorate.

If you had a degree in electronics you'd have to be slightly mad to go anywhere near the music sector these days, working for the likes of Nokia or Siemens in communications or digital broadcast is where it's at if you need to be paid. I know monkeys (literally trained monkeys, the college is around the corner from me and these guys have NO aptitude for electronics at all, they signed up 'cos of the money and convenience) that have gone on 2-year broadcast technician courses - they now make several times more than anyone I know in the music sector, and that includes people with doctorates...

I've been building electronics since early teenage years, and I'm now 33. During this time I've come across many audio "designers" - the 2 best guys I know have degrees, but they would've been that good regardless. A computer hardware guy I used to work for had no degree, yet he's become a multi-millionaire from a combination of designing + installing pc-gear and also video broadcast suite repair work.

Working in any sector relating to music is a vocational affliction, and if you really can't see yourself working elsewhere I guess it doesn't matter if you have a degree (although the top-end oems such as SSL or Meyer etc will not interview you without a degree, unless you're in sales).

My suggestion is get as formal a qualification as you can if you want to keep your options open. You may not have kids or a mortgage now, but you could be thankful for the qualification in later life (particularly if the future of music production moves more towards a bunch of kids with laptops rather than real acoustic environments with Neve 8068s...).

When I attend the AES lectures in London I sometimes stick around for tea and biscuits afterwards; when I meet the older generation of engineers who trained at the likes of CADAC or EMI etc they tend to speak in a language that's alien to most "engineers" I meet in studios of my generation. I do wonder if software has taken much of the need for root core-theory away from modern generations. When I visit some large pro studio complexes they regard me as a geek, but compared to some of the guys you see around here I'm not in the ballpark.

Justin

[quote author="Rochey"]even with a degree in electronics - you still come out of uni with no idea how things are done in the real world [/quote]
Oh, yes.

But is also true that there is a very wide variation in what, and more importantly how, you get taught. There are a few good places around where there are staff who are into analog stuff, and here you might well learn stuff. But if they can imbue you with the basic principles, then they've given you the tools to learn for yourself - and most of that stuff happens (or should happen) in the first year of a uni course.

Yes, I have formal electronics and acoustics qualifications, but I learned about the real stuff by actually doing it. I can't see any reason why anybody who's intellegent, and just as importantly, motivated enough can't teach themselves more than enough to get by in electronics, though. And sometimes it's good not to have your thinking for a long time constrained by what somebody told you was the 'correct' way to do things - this can lead you to miss a lot. There is a long history, certainly in the UK, of real innovations coming from people who were not constrained by being taught only one way to think by the education system - which is far from perfect in this regard. I have seen plenty of people around with a B.Eng or whatever who do no more than devalue the currency of the degree.

But for anybody who wants to go it alone - well, more power to them. If you want to give youreself a good introduction to semiconductor analog stuff, then buy 'The Art of Electronics' and the student manual that comes with it, and a scope and a DVM, and work your way carefully through the first part - the analog bit. This is a basic Harvard lab course - for the cost of a book and a few bits and pieces. The only prerequisite for doing this, the authors say, is curiosity - and judging from what others in this thread have said, this is pretty important - I'd say probably the most important thing. Also, having forums like this around where you can compare notes with people who are as keen as you has got to be worth equally as much as a bit of paper from a uni if you actually want to do the stuff... (although getting a potential employer to see this might be a little harder, I suppose)

[quote author="thermionic"]I do wonder if software has taken much of the need for root core-theory away from modern generations.[/quote]
Some universities will try to kid you that this is true - but it's absolutely not true if you want to do analog stuff, and most importantly, understand what you are doing. This can save you a lot of thermal disasters, and time!

Buying a second hand analog console forced me into DIY because I could not afford to pay a technician to take a look at it. I'm into this for half a year and I have learned so much, yet know so little.
This forum is a blessing.

I stuck my hand into my brother's Viking ham radio tranmitter when I was eight and got shocked. When I woke up, I knew everything he knew!

:razz:

My Dad made the family gramophone using a Post Office turntable. It wasn't very loud and had no tone controls and we scratched a mark where the 45rpm was - it eventually was different every time as the motor got worn, and I would find the right speed by playing Apache by the Shadows and tuning the speed to my guitar. This was 1960, but I never soldered anything until around 1970 - a Tremolo unit from Practical Electronics, then a Fuzz Box etc nothing very interesting until I came upon a circuit for the Univox Microphaser which was better, then I was hooked.
Stephen