About

Photo Credit: John Fell

My name is David Morrin. I am a technician at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, a department of the Tisch School of Arts at New York University. The Recorded Music department has three studios that are maintained by a staff of technicians, of which I am one. Previously, I was a technician at Main Drag in Brooklyn where I worked on a wide variety of musical instrument electronics including amplifiers, speaker cabinets, effects/signal processors, keyboards, electric guitars, and anything else in that general world.

I can be reached at dwmorrin@gmail.com

This website is something of an online notebook for myself. Some articles are written like tutorials in various electronic subjects, but really they are just my own notes to myself. If anyone else finds them useful, then that would be even better.

I play guitar, bass guitar, and keyboards with enough proficiency to have previously worked as a professional musician. In my younger days I dabbled with band and orchestra instruments. I can still squeak out a tune on a woodwind and make some racket on a trumpet, but I never studied those instruments seriously.

My main hobby at the moment is a modular synthesizer system. This grew out of a modular guitar effects project.

A lot of what I am writing and recording here is gleaned from other sites, and I will credit them in my articles if I take anything directly. I partly started this site to collect the good information I was getting, and sometimes giving, on the various DIY forums I was frequenting.

Some of my favorite sites are:

"Pedal-centric" sites. Usually less technical, better for beginners:

geofex.com

diystompboxes.com (forum)

freestompboxes.com (forum)

beavisaudio.com

electrosmash.com

dirk-hendrik.com

smallbearelec.com

My more "serious" audio favorites:

sound.westhost.com

douglas-self.com

music-electronics-forum.com (forum)

Synthesizer sites:

musicfromouterspace.com

birthofasynth.com

paia.com

electro-music.com (forum)

Favorite Books on Electronics:

Solid State Servicing by William Sloot

Small Signal Audio Design by Douglas Self

Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill

RCA Tube and RCA Transistor Manuals

Any service manual that includes circuit descriptions/analysis