Download a five-page article by David L. Heiserman on “Music Synthesizers And How They Work” from Popular Electronics magazine, February 1972. Also included is a brief description and schematic for a ‘surf synthesizer’ project.
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.