Hi!

First of all, don't panic!

Some tips:

Learn what's an output and what's an input. Only plug an output into an input. This should make it pretty much impossible to blow anything up by mistake.

About the simplest patch you could make is... let's see... if you have a MIDI to CV converter (eg A-190-2 or A-190-3), a VCO (eg A-110), and a VCA (A-131), you could plug the converter's "CV note" (note pitch) output into the oscillator's "CV1" input, the converter's "gate" (note length) output into the VCA's "CV1" input, the oscillator's waveform output (any of them) into the VCA's "audio 1" input, and the VCA's output into some headphones, starting its output volume at 0 and slowly moving it up to about 0.5, which is loud enough for me at any rate.

Then once you get bored of that, start swapping things out and putting more things in between these parts. Want more expressive playing Plug the converter's cryptically named "CV V/V" output (note velocity) into the VCA's "CV2". (Actually, I might be missing something myself here, as loud notes leave the attenuator open even after the gate's closed... Which is curious, as I thought a closed gate would output 0v and anything multiplied by 0 is 0, so maybe the VCA's CV1 and CV2 are added together, not multiplied... See, I don't really know what I'm doing here either, but it's fun working it out!) Or add a filter, they're always good. You can wire up the gate to an ADSR generator (eg A-140) to the VCA, to get a more pleasant rising and lowering of the volume with each note. Or you could wire it up to the filter, so its cutoff point falls down over time.

Unless you're being quite literal about getting the modular equivalent of a Dark Energy, and bought the A-111-5 The thing about the A-111-5 is that it's a whole synthesiser inside a single module. While I'm sure it's great, and I'm guessing it's a friendly introduction or stepping stone to modular synthesis, it does seem to somewhat defy the modular philosophy, which (like Unix) seems to largely be about each tool doing a single job very well. (Not that I'm complaining! The A-100 seems partly based on the Roland System-100M in places, at least in terms of the naming scheme, and even the 110 module that had was an all-in-one synth module.)

I haven't used the A-111-5, but looking at a picture of it, it looks like you just hook a MIDI to CV converter up to its VCO F input (for the note's pitch) and ADSR gate input (for the note's length), and then you forget it's in a module unless you want to extend it in some way.

Anyway, to learn pretty much everything about synthesis, try Gordon Reid's Synth Secrets series for Sound On Sound: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/allsynthsecrets.htm (It's in reverse chronological order for some reason.)

But the most fun and idiosyncratic way to learn something is through personal experimentation, so just go ahead and start wiring things up randomly and seeing what happens, as long as you only connect outputs to inputs.

Good luck!

Hope that helps,
Zoë.