So how did you guys initially learn about electronics?

[FrankSL]

I have a degree at high school (actually its equivalent, it's what you do before university) in EE, but I consider myself a retard too... :grin:

I hate the fact that I forgot many things due to not using them for some years, I was great with transformers, damn...

This place made me take out the old books and return the passion, unfortunately I'm very busy to study as much as I's like to...
(should I study a little more english too? :wink: )
Frank

 

[Flatpicker]

Used to, I couldn't even spell 'lectronics, now I r 1. :green:

 

[The Kid]

What got me started, was The Guitar Handbook, which had a little preamp in it. I'm also one of those "taking stuff apart since I was 5" people. So, after I went as far as I could with the preamp, I started going to the local library, and devouring what was available. Then, when I went as far as I could go with that, I decided to go for the EE degree.

The thing I discovered about the formal training, wasn't the stuff I already knew; it was the stuff I DIDN'T or couldn't figure out on my own. I may have eventually stumbled across the answers,(uh, yeah) but the training shortens the time it takes, since somebody already figured it out 50 years before I was born! (You do the math!)

I totally understand the formal/no formal training thing; one part of me, likes the rebel, no college, do it yourself attitude. But, the other part, is worried about a 20/20 film crew showing up, asking what the hell I was thinking, and where did I get my training!

The important thing about it, is not necessarily how you do it, but that you just do it! When I built that preamp, and it worked, it gave me the confidence to continue, and also wet my appetite for more knowledge, so I could go farther, and faster! Actually, now that I recall, it did work, but it sounded like shit, so I had to figure out WHY, and what would make it better.

The other important thing about the degree, is that it makes it a little easier to get a job, compared to somebody that doesn't have one. (At least, I haven't yet seen any ads (in the electronic field) for someone without at least a 2 year degree.

The funny part is, I only wish I had done it sooner than I did, 'cause I coulda saved a lot of headaches! :green: :sam:

 

[PRR]

> I'm currently Studying Composition and Production at University.

OK, but remember that no school really teaches you what you need to know. They can only help you learn it yourself. Think of doctors: doctors don't heal anybody, they keep you alive and supported while your body heals itself.

> Did you teach yourself? ::::: You have to do that no matter what formal training you have.

Right.

> I did a traineeship but learnt more about audio electronics talking to Kev on the phone. Lucky me.... I found the formal training enabled me to talk to Kev.

Exactly.

> University almost killed my creativity

That can happen. Don't let it.

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

I don't think an EE alone will get you an interview for a studio job. If you do get in the door, they will want to know what you really know, and see your solder-burns, not what classes you sat through in school. At present there are a few outfits who will hire raw EEs for basically digital jobs, but any analog EE position will again want to see your analog chops, knowing that very few schools really teach that any more.

> 90% of the... kids in my EE classes seem to have no clue or shred of hands on experience.

I am always shocked when I work with a grad EE student. Where have they been the last 5 years? Yes, they know the math, but you hand them a capacitor and they stare at it. If I express the problem text-book style, they can derive an equation and even an answer, but they still aren't sure what the capacitor is for.

> you still come out of uni with no idea how things are done in the real world

Aside from knowing where to stick the cap, there is a BIG gap in learning how to work in an organization, including the dirty-work like meetings and Documentation and absorbing wisdom. One essay I saw says it takes 7 years for a new-hire EE to actually become useful to the company, a shocking factoid but plausible.

> currently getting my EE degree... but drinking too much beer..

Voice of experience: don't pay kilobucks of tuition and drink/smoke/snort/screw-away the semester. That's just stupid. Total waste of money. It may not seem so now, but it will when you see student-loan payment demands and realize how little you got for the money. Especially if you drank your way to the bottom of the class and have no big-buck job to pay the loan with. If you must drink, don't bother with school.

> Working in any sector relating to music is a vocational affliction

"Affliction" (sickness) is a good word. Working in music is unprofitable. You have to wonder about any activity where most of the steady jobs are in teaching others to do it. For every big-name musician who earns millions of dollars for her manager, there are thousands of music-teachers just above poverty, and tens of thousands of musicians starving on their music-related income (or working at WalMart to buy guitar-strings). Do NOT take up music as a career: you WILL starve. However if your mind is so bent that you just MUST play all the time, you should learn as much as you can about music and gear and the business.

> The important thing about it, is not necessarily how you do it, but that you just do it!

Right on. Thinking and dreaming is necessary but NOT sufficient. Make mistakes fearlessly, so you can make different mistakes next time.

 

[electronaut]

I walked into a local luthier's shop in Chicago, saw his handmade guitars and instrument amplifiers, had my mind completely blown, and walked out changed forever.

I remember thinking, "This guy MADE his amplifiers??? I thought guys in white lab coats working in multimillion dollar corporations were needed for such a thing!!!"

Now I make my own mic amps, instrument amps, etc. and have accidently discovered something that now occupies most of my time!

 

[Flatpicker]

Actually, it was Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects For Musicians that created the interest to send me back to school - I wanted to know how that stuff worked! Of course afterwards, I got stuck in factories testing /repairing things I had little interest in - mainly nuclear radiation measuring equipment. Horrible life, working in factories! Fortunately, I don?t have to do that kind of stuff now.

Can't say that I agree with the "you can't make it in the music business" way of thinking. I have musician friends that have done every bit as good as I have by teaching private lessons. They can easily make $25-$30 an hour and work all the hours they want. A few have even promoted themselves to the point where they can write instruction books, and travel about doing workshops plus a little touring, and clear $65K-$70K a year! Depends on how hard you are willing to work at it and where you are willing to go. Sure an engineer can make a $80K-$100K salary, but most of them that I know are working 50-65 hours a week, too!

One thing's almost always for certain: you will do exceeding well at thing(s) you love to do, and only mediocre at best with anything else. So if you love doing things that make lots of money (and most of us don't) you are in luck!

 

[Learner]

[quote author="PRR"]

I am always shocked when I work with a grad EE student. Where have they been the last 5 years? Yes, they know the math, but you hand them a capacitor and they stare at it. [/quote]


hehe....I do that too and scratch my head and think what the hell is 2A103k!!?????? I donno why they have to label the caps in that fashion, always ended up reaching the meter to measure it and see.... :shock: :roll: :?

Can anyone suggest a good way of remembering how to read it? I know this is back to analog principle 1 in the first semester but........ I think I have some memory problem and may be also some ADD plus some learning disability..... :roll: :sad:

 

[Sammas]

Can't say that I agree with the "you can't make it in the music business" way of thinking.

Oh no!! I intend to the full extend of my ability to try and succeed in the music business!! (i think im one of those people who has an alternate view of life - the one where i know i can acheive anything if i put my mind to it)... meh, call me nieve if you want but i know where im going, and where i want to be...

How did i find this place? trying to find cheaper alternatives to better quality audio. I just figured that instead of choosing subjects at Uni that are pretty much a waste of time, and just fill the final credit points for my Music Composition and Production Degree i'd do something that might actually be useful. ie, Electronics. Surely it'll be helpful when the caps in the vintage 1176 go bad that day in the Neve equipped studio where im producing a chart topping band :wink:

 

[Guest]

I nearly got started in Electronics when I was 17 and joined the army as a radar tech (same job as Joe Meek I believe) - but got mislaid a couple of months later into accountancy (via the tea boy route) and then into Systems Analysis
Now at 39 I have found this forum and it's patient and very gracious members and have got the electronics bug big time...
WHen I cam here I didn;t even know what a bipolar powers supply was (to be quite honest I didn't know anything)
But after six months of nearly daily visits things are becoming a bit clearer...
I now understand why a cap can smear audio... in fact I even now roughly what a cap is - at to be quite honest what a "smear" is...

 

[Greg]

I got into electronics in high school by messing with my bass and guitar amps. After high school I decided to go to college for EE. I got my BS (hehe!!!) in EE last year, and am now working on my MS. As other people have stated earlier, going to college for EE isn't really going to help out that much with hands on electronics work, or becoming some type of technician... at least not pertaining to audio.

I took one DC circuits course, one AC circuits course, and two electronics courses (with labs). I learned alot of theory and how to break down a mass of equations into a nice little matrix to solve for the unknowns, but as PRR stated, they don't really explain what things actually do. For example, just the other day, an undergrad friend of mine asked me what this particular cap was doing. He was building an EKG for electronics class, and there was a DC coupling cap in there. He's a senior and couldn't recognize that the cap was there to block DC. It's not big deal really, but electronics is definitely not the focus in EE. I didn't even know to wire up a power transformer until I build my first GSSL last year.

Many people in EE have no interest in electronics or audio, and that's fine by me. There are many sub-disciplines within EE, like power, computer, controls systems, signal processing, communications, optics, etc. I enjoy EE very much, but my focus in school is not electronics. I did take one Audio Engineering elective course, and I asked my professor why he didn't teach about tubes, and he said the university wouldn't let him. And he has his own tube guitar amp on the market, so I was hoping to learn something from him. I thought that sucked. The course was awesome, though.

One last thing... the question of "how does it sound?" or "what's the frequency reponse?" doesn't come up often at all in electronics classes. It's usually more like "do you have the correct gain?" I've learned more in one year at this forum (pertaining to audio electronics) than I did in school.

 

[nwsoundman]

Electronics were part of my audio engineering courses at Sound Masters. I hated them and thought to myself that I would never need them and wanted to just record music. After school I got hired as a electronic tech and never got fully out of the field. It pays the bills.

NWSM

 

[Freddy G]

Although I have no formal training in the electronics field, I would not say that I am self taught. Oh yeah, I tried to learn just through books but I quickly got bored...no, it was not until I found this forum and all the very generous people here that I really got into it.
I am a luthier by trade (yes formally trained) and after installing and wiring up the electronics for many, many electric guitars it started to dawn on me how these pots and caps and switches really worked. Learned my soldering skills there too. I've always been into DIY of one form or another...my dad taught me not only the value of making things for yourself, but that if you stick to very high standards, not only are you likely to make something which is superior to spit-em-out-production models but one also gets great satisfaction. Heck, practically every piece of furniture in my dad's house he made himself not to mention most of the house too.
But I digress....
My first electronic DIY was a Paia mic preamp. I still use it and it's not bad.
Then I got rooked by a so called mic pre "kit" from ONe oF cjEnRIck'S FAvouRiTe TEChs. :wink:
Actually, it was probably because that "kit" was so lame that it got me into figuring out how put it together, build a power supply, make PC boards, chassis, front panel and even experiment with different components. So on second thought....tHaNkS P! :grin:
Freddy Gabrsek

 

[PRR]

> I am a luthier by trade (yes formally trained) ..... Then I got rooked by a so called mic pre "kit" .... it was probably because that "kit" was so lame

There was once a guy, formally trained skilled craftsman making really excellent electric motors and other devices when those were all hand-made. He bought a car. He thought it was awful, and he knew he could do better. Pretty soon his engine ran for 6 hours straight (unusual for those days). He put it in a chassis and drove it home (most cars could not be trusted that far). A little later it was driven 145 miles in one day, an astonishing achievement.

A month later, the electrical craftsman met "Dirty Rolls", car dealer, who agreed to sell all the cars that Henry Royce could build. You've probably heard of them.

Their 6 cylinder car ran 15,000 miles with "no tinkering by the way". (Even several years later, the Ford Model T inspired the song "Get out, and get under!", about constant roadside tinkering.)

So if an electrican can go into cars and do all right, you may have a career as an amp designer and builder.

Factoid I had not known before: Reasonably enough, the first Royce was a 2-cylinder. Going from a Two to a Four is simple. But going from a Two to a Six, using Two-think, gets you in trouble. A Two and a Four have a "flat crank", all throws at 0 and 180 degrees. Easy to make. But try that at 6 cylinders, and you get a very nasty engine. An Eight can work that way, but there are much better ways. Royce's electric motors ran verrrry smooth, so he figured it out. A dead-end was Lancaster's crank damper: still widely used to mask minor unbalance but can't fix bad balance or stupid firing sequence. Apparently it was Royce, the motor-master, who probably knew 3-phase theory, who realized that a Six must be cranked at 120 degrees, not 180 degrees. And he also proved that a proper Six is a MUCH nicer engine than the best Four.

 

[BYacey]

My dad is an electronics technician, so I guess I come by it through genetics.
There were always old radio and TV parts around the basement, and at 5 years of age thought my bike needed signal lights.

Later on I did some experimentation with an old electric fencer, a brass doorknob and my younger brother. This experiment was short lived after my mother grabbed the same doorknob. I moved on to building radios and reading all the back issues of Popular Electronics from 1957 to around 1980; Lots of good learning there. Went through apprenticeship after high school. Wish I still had that fencer...

 

[crazydoc]

I came back from Viet Nam with a desire to be a ROCK STAR. For that I would need a guitar amp, so built a Heathkit. Somebody gave me hundreds of old issues of Radio Electronics and a shitload of components and I started building audio related projects. I started buying books of projects and schematics and went dumpster diving behind all the electronics and surplus stores. I made test equipment such as a transistor curve tracer, four channel scope switch, function generator, regulated power supply and frequency counter.

I think the most important thing I learned was when I found out you could take different parts of different circuits and hook them together to make various new devices. These seldom worked (because I usually substituted parts on hand for those called for), but produced lots of smoke and sparks. This culminated in the design and construction of an audio spectrum analyzer, which actually worked. I saw essentially the same design published a year or two later in Byte Magazine.

By this time I was supporting a wife and kids, and my avocational interests had turned to optics and photography. Then I got back to playing music again, writing songs and recording demos, which lead again to the need for audio and recording equipment and back to electronic DIY again.

 

[Consul]

I was into electronics as an early teenager, since I was fascinated by the idea of building devices that actually do things. My earliest interests were lasers and holography. Amazingly enough, I found that knowledge from there actually applies to the audio world when I got involved in a discussion on shock and vibration isolation on Klaus Heyne's message board.

I am completely self-taught in electronics, although I still don't have the math down (Ohm's Law is about the most I know), so I feel I still have a long way to go.

I decided to pursue it as a hobby again so I could build my own project studio, since creating music is really one of my biggest loves, on par with filmmaking. Finding the time and money to finish building my current slew of devices has proven difficult since I moved, though.