I attended a workshop on Building Digital Synthesizers with Arduino as part of the 2019 Gray Area Festival. Taught by Taurin Barrera, it promised we’d learn, “the basics of building, programming, and performing with DIY synthesizers.” Coming from a software background, hardware always feels like a mystery to me so I thought it might be a good chance to learn some fundamentals. We worked with a DIY kit from Cornfield Electronics. There was a lot of soldering. Taurin pointed us in the direction of this handy comic about soldering and it helped. It takes practice getting the right amount of solder, but by the end of the class I was feeling pretty confident and I had my own working synthesizer! We had the opportunity to choose the “sound” of our synth and I went for Arpology written by Bill Alessi, which is “highly influenced by Brian Eno.”