Thom Conaty from _maker

This is an interview I did with Thom Conaty from _maker, a startup that is creating an online platform to help musicians learn about electronics. Full disclosure: I’m friends with Thom, already interested in this stuff, we did the same masters and even worked together on an art project last year. Bearing this possible bias in mind I think _maker have hit onto something really interesting. I got in touch with Thom to see what they’re up to.

Who are _maker?
_maker is myself and Colin Maher, the other director, and we’ve got Tom Canning, Stephanie McCabe and Philip Hayden helping out as well.

How did you get started?
I got interested in DIY electronics about 4 years ago when I got started circuit bending, which is taking apart old electronic noise making things and coaxing sounds out of them by poking around. There was no actual knowledge going on though, I was just poking around with circuit boards to see what I could find. Then the more I did that I became interested in what was actually going on? How do I control this a bit more? So then I got a few kits online and started building things and I got sucked into it.

When did _maker get started?
We started brainstorming in September 2011 and straight after we came up with the idea I noticed that an entrepreneurship programme was starting in the Trinity Enterprise Hub, so I enrolled. It was exactly what we were interested in at the time. We were trying to start a business and it was incredibly useful. We kinda just threw ourselves into it. At the end of the year they had a business development competition which we presented at and won. Shortly after that they came to us and offered us an office space for 6 months.

What does _maker do?
Our objective is to create a learning platform to teach DIY electronic to musicians. We cover everything from making guitar pedals to modular synthesizers while teaching people about the electronics that’s going on behind the scenes as well. It’ll all be done as video tutorials online. We’re doing guitar pedal making workshops at the moment. Which are a complete introduction to DIY electronics. People come in and all the components and tools that you need, and over the course of three hours we walk you through making a guitar pedal. We start off with soldering practice and then we just get started and go through putting the circuit together and housing everything in an enclosure. The thing about DIY electronics is that it is very straightforward. It’s so straightforward in fact that we can take a complete beginner in and in three hours they’ve made their own fuzz pedal.

It’s an online idea though, is that the point?
It’s online, it’s all video tutorials and the whole learning process is free and open source. It’ll be hosted on YouTube and with all the schematics available for free. We’ll sell the kits to do the projects in the video, because we can buy in bulk there’s a lot of money to be saved for the consumer.

You mentioned to me before that you are trying to foster a community online?
That’s a massive part of it. That’ll drive the content we produce. We want to produce content that people want to learn so we’re going to really try and have everything focused around our forum and to encourage things like circuit design competitions. Things that will try to bring in the community, they’re the ones who are learning so the more we can provide for them the better.

Are the workshops part of your ongoing plan?
They’re a good introduction to DIY electronic and we really enjoy doing them, just getting out there and meeting people. We’ve also been developing our first couple of projects. We’ve currently got two guitar pedal projects, a light controlled synth, which is pretty cool, and a little visual metronome project as well. These are just to test the whole process of creating a project and seeing how people respond to it, but we’re still very much in the early stages.

What do the projects involve?
The idea is that there’d be a video tutorial walking you through the project and you would have a kit and a soldering iron and you would make the project as you go through the video. Then there would be another video explaining all the electronic principals involved in the project, so that the practical learning is contextualised. As you get better and you’re more interested you’d move on to more complicated ones, while learning more electronic principals. So eventually you could go off and design your own stuff.

Are they online at the moment?
They’re coming out soon, the kits are almost ready…

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Thanks to Thom for taking the time to talk to me. You can find out more info about _maker on their website or Facebook page and here’s a video of their Fuzz pedal in action.

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