Basic electronics book recommendations... (Page 1 of 2)

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-P … bb_product

it's not the cover which counts here. other good resources are the synth-diy mailing list and http://electronotes.netfirms.com/

Seems like an interesting read. 

Biotek, have you read this one? or just recommending it due to word of mouth etc?

ordered it , got stuff to keep me reading for a while... and hopefully some hands on experimentation will follow. Call the firemen

i have the Electronic Projects for Musicians book. It's alright, definitely geared around building pedals but it has some other projects. kind of out-dated though in some ways, especially when you are looking for IC's.

I advise every book written by Forrest Mims III. This man is the one if you need to start with electronics (in general)
and you don't have a single clue.
All of the books I have from him are just Xeroxed copies of his handwriting (written like every respectable engineer
would do, in upper case block style!) with lots of schematics, perfect tutorial on how to read them, what every single
component does etc etc etc.
Albeit I have studied electronics at the technical high school I was in, I still refer to those books whenever I have a
circuit to solve and I need a practical and quick way to do it... Possibly Mr. Mims has already done it before me

By the way, this man wrote as well the operator manual for the Altair 8800...

if your ultimate goal is to do minor repair/maintenance on your synths then you're going to need to learn to solder.  if you're serious invest in some tools: soldering iron, desoldering pump, multimeter, etc.

practice soldering and desoldering.  good starting points are practicing on broken electronics (avoid TVs), circuit bending cheap battery operated stuff, or getting a small electronics kit perhaps something from buildyourownclone.com that has musical value.

I ran across this recently:

http://www.adafruit.com/index.php?main_ … 2db60c02ba

If you haven't got any tools, this doesn't sound all that bad. Or you can use the kit as a source of inspiration... Starting with crappy tools can be pretty frustrating.

I have the Electronic Projects for Musicians and I agree, its hard to get some of the parts... for a newer book with easy to find parts and some fun projects try Handmade Electronic Music by Nicolas Collins  http://www.amazon.com/Handmade-Electron … 0415975921 
(biotek and i saw him do a demo/book release in chicago

there is another edition coming out soon.

I'm pretty fond of the  ' Evil Genius ' series.  All of their books have thorough project descriptions and parts listings.  Here's a link to one of their books , but you can easily get drawn into a whole wormhole of others on amazon.  They have a nice sense of humor as well!  Their spy book is loads of fun
http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Circui … pd_sim_b_4

I HIGHLY recommend anything Forrest Mims (also mentioned!) 

Practical Electronics for Inventors  is quite a resource, better to use as reference material than a getting started on projects type book.   http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electro … 0071452818

For kits, this website - solarbotics - offers a lot of great little build-yourself robots and things to get you started
http://www.solarbotics.com/

Finally, I took a class in basic analog circuits and this is our syllabus.  there are links to a LOT of great resources just on that.  Starting at the very basics, like soldering and using a multimeter....  if you want to do anything electronics... you must get very friendly with your multimeter, its essential!  and better yet a 'scope  (looks cooler anyway) !  you need to use it to identify where/what the problems are (in a faulty synth or any other circuit) before you start to fix them.  there are some classes in there that deal with audio ....

http://web.mac.com/er0sentha1/NYUBAC/Syllabus.html

have fun !

edit :  just thought of one other tip...  if you want to be confident you're really getting it - pick an online kit and buy two of them.  the first one, put together on their given printed circuit board.  when that works, throw away the PCB on the second kit and just put it together on a breadboard.  it helps.

subk has an excellent point. Key tool is actually a breadboard, without it things are extremely frustrating. You can still screw up by blowing devices, but at least it doesn't take soldering to change anything in your circuit.

If you want a bit more of an academic approach to things, I can highy recommend Tietze/Schenk, which is a German book but also seems to exist in an English translation. In general I think it helps not to shy away from at least some of the theory, it really helps in developing intuition for circuits.

yes oxidation on contacts, dried solder joints and cheap electrolytic capacitors (exatcly what you find in consumer electronics) are the usual culprits. integrated circuits are sensitive to static discharges too, although nowadays there are measures to protect against that. not sure how it was back in the seventies/eighties.

youtube also has lots of resources, for example lectures on mitopencourseware:

MIT 6.002 Circuits and Electronics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfQxyVuLeCs