Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Where should I start?
A: Well, we would love for you to purchase the whole Electronotes package. This really is a great saving of over half the cost of the individual items. Still it's a fair amount of money ($300) but many of you have paid more than that for just three text books. If you had to get just one thing, it would probably be the Builder's Guide and Preferred Circuits Collection. This you could peruse to see what we say about an actual construction effort and you could look at the circuits to see if they look like something you could handle. The Musical Engineer's Handbook offers a lot more in the way of theory. If you are looking more toward digital music synthesis, perhaps a volume or two of the most recent Electronotes would be most useful. Note that we are quite liberal about allowing you to "upgrade" to the whole package - using your original purchases as a credit.
Q: Isn't that $300 pretty expensive?
A: It's $300 which is a lot to some folks and pocket change to others. Here is what it is from our business point of view. We have roughly 6000 pages in the everything package, and printing is currently 3.3 cents/page (inventory replacement costs). We also have about $35 built into the price to cover shipping. That puts us at $234! It leaves $66 for our time, for our inventory holding espenses, for misc. expenses, and for any profits. So the question is rather - how do we do it so cheaply? The answer is: because some of the items in the everything package were printed at a much lower cost - years ago. That's the only thing that is keeping the price so low. Eventually we will run out of more and more items, and the price will have to go up. Also, we are still adding more new items than we are removing. And the buyer can always start out smaller, and build up a credit toward the full package if that works best.
Q: Do you accept PAYPAL?
A: Yes - we just recently tried this. The account is at berniehutchins@yahoo.com - our usual email contact. We are not currently adding any surcharge for using paypal. Feel free to use it. One request however. In addition to any order through paypal, please send a separate email telling us what you are ordering. (There is however no need to send the filled out order form.) This permits us to make sure your order makes sense to both buyer and seller. And - please include your complete mailing address - this sometimes comes through from paypal in a garbled form, and we want to cut/paste address labels directly from the email so we minimize errors.
Q : Why don't you have the whole thing on line?
A : Well, that would be quite an order even if we wanted to do it. There really is a stack of papers a foot high, double sided. Unless you have free internet time and free laser printing (which means someone else is paying!) and a lot of time to waste, you are far better off ordering from us. And, we need to get something back for the years of work that went into it.
Q: Is analog synthesis dead? Is digital better?
A: Of course one must not generalize. Analog synthesis, as we knew it from the commercial efforts of Moog, Arp, and from many other companies, and more specifically as we at Electronotes promoted it as a practical home-hobbyist activity, is gone. What is it that's gone? Well, when we began, we were just finding things out, and very soon, an individual could build a better synthesizer, and at less expense, than one could buy one. But many people were also doing this for the fun of making sounds and making music, not just for the fun of building circuits. At one point I saw, in a department store, a synthesizer for $149 that I knew was a much easier and cheaper route to having fun with sounds and music. So you can do analog synthesis if it is the building you enjoy as much as the sounds and the music, or if you feel an analog sound is inherently superior, and if you can get along without the very large support base of fellow builders.
While there seems to be some activity in hobby-level analog synthesizers (on the Internet), it is but a remote relative to the intense support (contributors for new circuits, sources for parts, help debugging, new applications, etc.) that was available. Today, often times, people do not even read the text of the old Electronotes issues before jumping on the Internet to ask for help, and then they get wrong answers from people who have not read the issues either, but who feel obliged to appear helpful. I myself am always glad to try to answer questions when an individual sends me a carefully prepared question with enough details that I can make a useful guess about what is going on.
Is digital better? Of course the answer is: sometimes, sometimes not. But you are reading this on a computer. Likely you know how to program - in C or in BASIC or something. You understand how you sequence instructions to make the machine do something for you. In Cornell DSP labs, we prepare about a 40-page handout on DSP assembly language, and ask the students to read it before coming to lab. Do they read it? Of course not! Do they get their lab exercises completed? Yes they do. About 20 minutes of instruction and a couple of examples, and they are off and running. The handout becomes a reference. Is this good result a consequence of Cornell students being exceptionally bright! Well, some of them are, and some of them aren't, but they all, and you too, know the basic ideas of programming. That's all you need to start. It's easier than getting started in analog.
I myself am not one to automatically embrace something simply because it is new and shiny. Indeed I drive a 1984 Ranger pickup. I do look at new trucks - I just don't need a new truck. [UPDATE: I got a new Ranger in 2001.] Some people however do long for and insist on the superiority of the good old days. Most of you have encountered (some of you may be) almost militant analog purist. The point I hope I am making is that these people, in also already knowing how to program, are well advised to look to digital methods, especially when it comes to experimentation, where complicated structures can be created and altered easily with no specific hardware investment.
Q: Can I put up Electronotes material on my site?
A: We have, at times, gotten a bad rap for supposedly not allowing people to post our material. In actual fact, we never denied material to anyone who asked and would agree to a few simple conditions which were, in essence:
Almost universally, people did not ask. What was most annoying were postings that seemed to deliberately (or by omission) suggest that the poster was the original source, which brought us no business (and at times, said that we were no longer in business!), and which had errors and misconceptions added in an authoritative voice. Happily, many of these offenders have gone on to "other pursuits" or perhaps the Internet has just become a place where more courtesy and integrity is expected.
Q: Do you still have your analog synthesizer set up?
A: No. It had been out of use for a number of years even before our move of a couple of years ago. A major portion of it was housed in a large enclosed "relay rack" that my wife calls "the telephone booth," and the panels were all taken out and stored somewhere. Long time readers will recall that I had a rather "informal" construction practice where components were all soldered to the top of the board, and the boards were more or less secured by soldering to convenient panel controls, jacks, etc. I still do favor and would recommend today that same mode of construction. It is described in the Builder's Guide and Preferred Circuits Collection. I could produce a circuit board in just two hours or so, and have it behind panel in a couple more hours. It didn't look too bad either, although it did look "unprofessional." Yet we have pointed out that here is no reason a circuit board produced at home need look like one made in a factory. Likely it does not even make sense to try for a factory appearance - and certainly there was no electrical reason to do so. But what I had were definitely prototypes. When I do find them some day, perhaps I will be able to figure out what they were. We made so much! It was great fun, but I never did get much of a chance, ever, to just play.
Q: What sort of digital things make sense? How do we do digital synthesis?
A: Most often there is no direct translation between analog and digital. But some basic things are identical - most notably the parametric nature of music synthesis. In analog synthesis, the parameters are knob settings and control voltages which represent pitch, loudness, durations, etc., pretty much analogous to a musical score. We set what are relatively slowly varying parameters that control audio frequency results. In a digital approach, what we think about is producing a sequence of samples. Typically, the sampling rate is twice the bandwidth. A CD for example has a rate of 44,100 samples/second. With digital synthesis, in contrast to analog synthesis, we really do have the ability to produce truly arbitrary sounds. This is the freedom we get by (simply?!?) assigning each and every sample. But we don't use this freedom. In fact, if we did, we would all be listening to white noise tunes! Instead we establish a relationship between samples in a sequence. We write programs that organize samples. In a simple case, we might require them to be samples of a sinewave. What have we done? We parameterized the synthesis. Relatively few numbers control thousands of samples (seconds of synthesized sound).
When we try to translate from analog synthesis to digital synthesis, there are no real rules. In fact, it is difficult to do normal subtractive synthesis with a digital approach. Additive synthesis is probably easier digitally. This is just a matter of generating samples (in a higher level language) and playing back a sound file. FM synthesis works pretty much equally well with a digital or an analog approach, although neither is easy if we are trying for an exact sound. Other methods like the marvelous Karplus-Strong plucked string synthesis are powerful, fairly simple, and uniquely digital.
Obviously, when it comes to experimentation where a particular structure is to be repeated a large number of times (such as the design of animators) a digital approach has immense advantages. Duplications are a matter of cutting and pasting portions of code (seconds of work), not of producing and soldering more and more boards. Many DSP cards with associated software are available, if not for production of music, at least for experimentation with synthesis methods. A couple of hundred dollars will get you going quite nicely on your own computer.
Q: Why do you have both Newsletters and Application Notes?
A: This is addressed a bit in our general information. Perhaps it is most interesting to say how the Application Notes came about. We had been producing Newsletters for about four years when, for a number of reasons, we decided to set up shop in a storefront just off the Cornell University campus (the Collegetown area if you know it). We had a Xerox machine installed for our printing, and since we were selling parts by mail order as well, we offered a more general line of parts over the counter (just trying to pay the rent actually!). So many people came in asking the same type of questions, one day I just got out the typewriter and typed up a few answers (power supplies at first). We sort of gave these away in the store or charged a dime. Soon it became a habit, and we added them to our mail-order offerings. It has always been the case that we thought of the Application Notes as electronics, and the Newsletter as electronic music.
Q: How many people work for Electronotes?
A: Gosh! I guess the answer is 0.834 persons. This is the figure used by the great sage Don Lancaster in his The Incredible Secret Money Machine (Sams 1978). He meant you should employ yourself - 83.4% of the time. We are a family business in terms of our extra income activities. We also do sewing (alterations). I once put on a button back when I was in the Army. So my wife does all the sewing and lets me do all the newsletter business.
Q: What are the "Supplements" all about?
A: Hmmmm. Well, they are not supplements to anything in particular - not to the MEH or EBG&PCC as some might missunderstand by the placement on the order form. Much of the function of the original supplements was taken over by the application notes. The ones we still include are either still thought to be valuable or in good supply (or both).