19+20+26.10.2024 Elements: Gain & Tone, effect design workshop

This is our beginner-friendly introduction to analog electronics of audio. The goal is to give you all the tools, knowledge and a bit of intuition to start designing effects yourself!

This workshop is focusing on the common building blocks of audio circuits: gain and tone, or amplification and filtering. What we'll go for is:

• Conceptual understanding of why things work the way they work
  
• How to reason through a circuit in time- and in frequency- domains

We will not focus on using math for solving circuits, although we'll go over where you can learn about that too.

Further workshops in the series are building on this introductory class and expand into modulation and delay lines.

What's included

• Protato – breadboarding jig with a built-in headphone amplifier designed specifically for this series of workshops
  
• Breadboard
• Jumpers
• Resistor kit
• Capacitor kit
• Transistor kit
• Set of diodes
• Set of opamps
• Set of potentiometers with breadboard adapters

What's covered

• Common circuits:
  • Tone Controls
  • Buffers & Splitters
  • Mixers & Blenders
  • Boosts
  • Overdrive & Distortion with Soft- & Hard- Clipping
• Design and prototyping techniques:
  • Intuition
  • Simulation tools
  • Breadboarding
  • Online calculators
• Basics of how common parts work:
  • Resistors
  • Capacitors
  • Transistors
  • Diodes
  • Operational Amplifiers
• Where to get inspiration

Protato the breadboarding jig

Protato is our own helper device used for experimentation. It's an adapter board with a built-in headphone amplifier that hooks up to a breadboard. The board is comes in a 3d-printed case.

Some of the features:

• Separate bypass and power switch
• JFET input and output buffers when in effect mode
• Headphone out with its own volume control
• Power, Ground, Buffered Reference, effect Send and Return broken out to headers on both sides of the device

Time & Place

The workshop takes place across three days. We start at 12pm and finish at about 4pm.

Day 1: basics of electronics and breadboarding, passive components, filters, tone controls;
Day 2: diodes, transistors and opamps, clipping, amplifiers and other active circuits;
Day 3: designing your own effect from scratch using the elements we've covered.

Location is our shop on Weichselstr. 32 12045 Berlin (HEADS UP there are two streets with the same name in Berlin, you need the one in Neukölln, not Friedrichshain).

What to bring

Please bring your own wired 3.5mm jack headphones.

To try things out feel free to bring your favorite instruments and sound sources. We will have some at the shop too of course.

Cancellations

You have the option to cancel and get a refund up until 1 week before the event. We would of course refund everyone if we have to cancel the workshop for any reason.

Next workshops in the series

Here are some of the other workshops in this series we are planning. These are independent of each other, but both would require some of the gear and the information from the Gain & Tone workshop.

• Amplitude will go into the basics of modulation. It'll cover control voltage, LFOs, envelope detectors, VCAs, compressors and expanders.
  
  
• Delay lines workshop is about creating time-based effects: delay, reverb, vibrato and chorus. As the foundation it uses a PT2399-based delay line, but the principles apply to any other digital or analog device.