Who’s going to be at Westercon in Portland? That’s this weekend! Anna has a share of a dealer table, so you’ll find us at least some of the time in the dealer room - at both conventions, actually, because that’s how it works out sometimes.

To be honest, we weren’t originally planning on Westercon, but a bunch of friends from afar are showing up, so ( Read more... )

I’ve been playing with that ‘added pressure adds bass response’ idea, for use with these piezo pickups. I made a little wooden chamber that would let me add light pressure, as with the bridge pickup design. It would be held down with a clamp for testing, but would isolate that pressure from the piezo itself.


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I guess it’s obvious in retrospect, but Monday I learned that a drum machine is basically just an overgrown sequencer. I kind of wonder if the original progression was the opposite way.

This is new to me because I’ve never used one before - all those drum tracks on previous work is microphone on live drums. Timing edited, sure, but live. But now I ( Read more... )

Okay, up front: I have built a working crystal microphone! It wants a fair amount of equalisation added to it, but that’s okay because I can do it in the digital audio workstation. (Normally there’d be some circuitry in the microphone to do that, but in this case there’s not. Reasons.) And, happily, it’s picking up the kind of range you’d expect ( Read more... )

A really weird thing is happening with the crystal mic. I do NOT understand this.

The same circuit board taken from another box and put in this box is much noisier. Like, 15-20db noiser. Both boxes are metal or metal-lined, and I’ve checked - repeatedly -the metal lining on this one is grounding.

This is true even with no crystal element attached.

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Apparently, I’m really into old-fashioned microphone technologies at the moment, and really, I’m just fine with that. I’ve had this boundary-microphone idea in my head for a while - I even ordered a bunch of parts to build it - and that idea and crystal microphone technologies go together!

Okay, first, crystal microphones were an actual thing. ( Read more... )

Building microphones is fun and seems to be of interest to readers, so here’s a collection post for posts about that! These posts discuss building both microphones, and, when applicable, their matching microphone driver circuits and/or pre-amplifiers.

Building a Carbon Microphone:

• A Microphone of Constant Sorrow, Part I - I just wanna be able to ( Read more... )

Laying down timing tracks for the new album, finally. I did four and a half tracks yesterday - this is a quick process. None of these recordings will make it onto the final, but it’s a helpful step.

For the moment, the new microphone is living as a display piece in the corner of the room, on the shelf with all the other microphones. Every time I ( Read more... )

I’ve been trying to build a carbon microphone. Why? Well, partly, because I can, and partly, because if you want that “telephone” sort of sound, the best way to do it is to use a telephone element rather than fake it later (see also: BULLHORN), and partly because I want to be able to sing into a can, like them fellers at the radio station.


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Yesterday it was Polish jokes about Soviet technology; today it’s trying a Russian-made TUNG-SOL tube in that ART TUBE MP mic preamp I played with last week. I got advice from Ben Deschamps that I should, because the ART preamp ships with whatever was cheapest that day, and swapping tubes around can make a big difference.

And, hey, I think in this ( Read more... )