The Atari Punk Console is probably every beginners gateway into DIY synth noise. Its simple, cheap and all the parts could be found at your local radio shack. Remember that place?
Radio Shack Forest Mims archive
If you can build this, and sit with it…perhaps stay entertained for 5 minutes or more, you might have found a hobby you can get into.
I was playing with this and your standard 40106 oscillators for a weekend that my head broke and I finally got into “Glitch” as a EDM Genre. It probably was the time that I turned the sound off, but all the sequences were still rattling in my brain, that I realized it was interesting.
All the bloggy folks were drawing up circuits, so I came up with the above one and a long lost post on my old site. Not a particularly good schematic, and my explaination on the circuit was not amazing, but it got linked up to heck and that image made it to the wikipedia.
I guess the wiki changed, but here is a BETTER version of what I tried to convey.
Careful what you do in the internets…it sticks around forever.