Make: Electronic Music from Scratch (Full Colour Edition)

Electronic Music from Scratch is a complete crash course in the joys of musical circuitry. Taking inspiration from famous instruments in electronic music history, this guide shows readers how to create dozens of whimsical, unexpected, and incredibly usable musical instruments. Create oscillators that compose their own melodies based on candle flickers, cassette players with keyboard attachments, a talkbox for scaring younger relatives, and so, so much more. Written with total beginners in mind, Electronic Music from Scratch will take readers on a journey through music history and lead them to discover sounds they didn't even know existed.

Don't just play music, make music!

Make: Electronic Music from Scratch is a crash course in the joys of musical circuitry that teaches makers to become musicians, and musicians to become makers. Written for total beginners, this guide uses more than 40 hands-on experiments and projects to build whimsical, wild, and just plain weird gizmos, including:

• Fruit-controlled oscillators
• Analog filters (in many flavors)
• Sequencers that compose for themselves
• Talkboxes for robot impersonation
• Plate reverbs for cave impersonation
• Automatic harmonizing doohickeys
• Light-sensitive modulators
• Amplifiers to annoy your neighbors
• Drum machines to get you dancing

. . . and so much more!

Be warned: This is not a boring, inaccessible engineering book for academics! Make: Electronic Music from Scratch is a fun, humorous introduction to music for even the biggest electrophobes that teaches how to build real, usable instruments. With more than 400 full-color images and step-by-step instructions, this is the music book that you've always wanted.

Prepare to discover sounds you never knew existed!

About the Author

Kirk Pearson is the founder and creative director of Dogbotic, a Bay Area-based audio laboratory where creative-driven inquiry meets inquiry-driven creativity. A composer and artist, Kirk has written music, built installations, and designed experiences for the New Museum, American Museum of Natural History, Switzerland's Museum für Kommunikation Bern, and for hundreds of films, stage productions, and new media projects. In 2017, Kirk was named a recipient of the Thomas Watson Fellowship, through which they spent a year traveling the world composing works for experimental instruments. Kirk lives in Berkeley, California.