Are you a musician, artist, or other creative person who has always wanted to learn basic electronics, or wondered if you could? Well, this first chapter was designed specifically for you.

In this chapter, you'll be introduced to the basic building blocks of working with analog electronics. You'll wire up your first circuits, analyze them with a multimeter and an oscilloscope, read and write circuit diagrams, and learn the theory that explains what you're seeing and hearing.

If you find this process of building and analyzing circuits to be fun and rewarding, electronics is probably something you'll enjoy. And as you learn more of the basic theory, and see what you can do with it, the number of interesting audio circuits you can build grows exponentially.

In this chapter you'll build and analyze your first ever analog audio circuit - a basic volume knob. This is of course not the most sonically compelling thing you'll ever make, but with the theory you'll learn doing this, you'll already be ready to build (and fully understand) a legitimately great sounding distortion effect similar to what's in many popular guitar pedals in the next chapter. And then in the third chapter (hopefully available soon) you'll learn all about capacitors, and use them to build a series of filters and tone controls. With just these fundamental circuits, the sonic possibilities you can explore from connecting them together in different ways is already enormous.

If you've stumbled across this website and aren't sure if this is of interest, I'd suggest spending 20-30 minutes and going through the first lessons underneath this one.

If my narration is too slow for you, you are encouraged to watch at 1.5 or 2x speed. This was designed to be completed in one long, focused day - but whether that's closer to 5 hours, or 10 hours, is entirely up to you.

If you have any questions or comments, reach out to me any time at crudlabs@gmail.com.