DOWNLOAD: SynthsPopElecFeb1972

Nice images of the Putney Synth and a Moog IIIc.  This article offers a very broad treatment of the subject, and it does not discuss music or music aesthetics very much; it is interesting though because it is intended for an audience with some technical savvy.  Everything in this piece can easily be applied to gaining a greater fluency with the software synths that we use today.

Naturally, any discussion of ‘music-synthesizers’ in Popular Electronics had to be followed by some sort of audio-synthesizer project; since this is 1972, the project is a Surf Synthesizer, aka a white-noise generator followed by a randomly-modulated low pass filter in sync with a VCA.  If you know what any of that means, you might could be interested in the schematic, which you can find after the link below.  I can imagine sitting at the kitchen table during the Nixon administration, carefully soldering this mood-enhancer while my wife macrames an Owl.