Historically it is a hobby that’s had a high financial barrier to entry.
But the past decade has had a huge flourish of affordable and unique synthesizers and related musical equipment show up on the market. A lot of this stuff can be a TON of fun regardless of your musical knowledge/skill level. A few days on YouTube and a hundred bucks and beginners can be making their own music, with or without a computer with audio software.
It starts simple, and can go to endless depths of creativity.
I super agree! I helped my daughter attend a zoom class on software based synths during covid, and had so much fun fiddling with making weird sounds and loops within loops. I forget the name, algorithm or something? Pd?. And you can get kits to solder up little real life circuits to string together, each one adds a whole dimension to what you can make the sounds do. Easy to get into and incrementally build on.
To anyone that might be interested in this you should check out VCV rack. It’s a free software emulation of modular euroracks. They even have software recreations of classic modules that would be considered standard for most racks.
Obviously this route lacks the major aspect of physical interaction and feedback which many say is a large component in there enjoyment of the hobby but you can still learn all the basic and experiment to find out if it’s something that grabs your interests.
Fair warning: If you do catch the bug there will be a point in time where you start trying to justify spending $400 on a single LFO module. This is normal. Don’t be afraid.
Musical synthesizers.
Historically it is a hobby that’s had a high financial barrier to entry.
But the past decade has had a huge flourish of affordable and unique synthesizers and related musical equipment show up on the market. A lot of this stuff can be a TON of fun regardless of your musical knowledge/skill level. A few days on YouTube and a hundred bucks and beginners can be making their own music, with or without a computer with audio software.
It starts simple, and can go to endless depths of creativity.
I super agree! I helped my daughter attend a zoom class on software based synths during covid, and had so much fun fiddling with making weird sounds and loops within loops. I forget the name, algorithm or something? Pd?. And you can get kits to solder up little real life circuits to string together, each one adds a whole dimension to what you can make the sounds do. Easy to get into and incrementally build on.
To anyone that might be interested in this you should check out VCV rack. It’s a free software emulation of modular euroracks. They even have software recreations of classic modules that would be considered standard for most racks.
Obviously this route lacks the major aspect of physical interaction and feedback which many say is a large component in there enjoyment of the hobby but you can still learn all the basic and experiment to find out if it’s something that grabs your interests.
Fair warning: If you do catch the bug there will be a point in time where you start trying to justify spending $400 on a single LFO module. This is normal. Don’t be afraid.