So ive been reading a bunch about building harmonica mics. I was thinking of buying one but im a newbie to the harp so why dish out the cash right now if i dont need too right. I have a few questions.
1. what is the best element for the cash. and were can i get one.
2. what is a good place to get a reasonably inexpensive pot. and again what model am i looking for. there are a lot of these.
3. is it worthy it? or should i just shell out the cash for a factory made mic.
there is a thread some where on here an some wonderful member made youtube videos on how to make em. check the search function on the left at the bottom.
The way you learn is to do. What are the best elements? Depends on what you like. Where do you get them? Developing your sources is part of the challenge but eBay is always a ready source. Pots aren't expensive. The right pot choice depends on what element you choose. You want 1Mohm or 5Mohm pots for crystal or ceramic elements, and 100K - 250K pots for dynamic elements. The best places are on line electronics supply places like Jameco and DigiKey. Some cities have electronics supply places. Even Radio Shack has a decent selection of pots.
Is it worthy? Depends. If you like to build stuff, absolutely. If you want the best mic for the money, fast, probably not - as you won't know what you don't know until you do it A LOT.
Looks like nirvana, doesn't it? But it isn't. The Shure elements are low impedance elements - those are unusual and not what you want until you know how to wire them with impedance matching transformers - and even then they may or may not be to your liking. To the lay person they look just like their high impedance brethren that you can just wire up to a connector and start sucking. Did you know you need to worry about impedance?
That "NOS Crystal Element from a BluesBlaster" is the el-cheapo japanese element Hohner started using when they ran out of Astatic MC-151 elements, and nobody likes 'em.
Those Turner mics all look cool but have bases as part of the shell casting. You can cut off the base but making the shell pretty again is a lot of work.
And you can guy a meter like that now for about $10.
Etc, etc, etc.
To me, it looks like some mic builder took a bunch of crap he can't do anything with and tried to "package" it as a boon for some poor unsuspecting sap that he hopes will pay way too much for it. (It isn't value-less by the way, but it might not be worth what you think.)
The point is - nobody can teach you all this. You have to do it, make mistakes, make stupid mistakes, and make more stupid mistakes. And you really have to develop an ear for tone, and you have to have a lot of experience playing amplified to PRODUCE good tone and then hear the difference between elements.
All of this is NOT to talk you out of this. Building your own mic is fun and rewarding. But if your goal is simply to get a mic cheap.... its a bad strategy. If you knew what a seasoned mic builder knows you COULD build a decent mic fairly cheap. But you're unlikely to know that on your first foray, or even your tenth.
I've built thousands of volume controls and adapters, built or modified hundreds of mics, and I'm still learning, all the time. And I love it. On the other hand the first mic I built, by my standards today, was a piece of garbage.
---------- /Greg
http://www.BlowsMeAway.com http://www.BlueStateBand.net
Last Edited by on Aug 02, 2009 9:46 PM
thanks greg. basically i just want something to practice with. i dont need a setup worty of giging with. Thats why i was asking about making one. Ill probably make one.
I made one from the element out of an old cb power mic and the volume control of the mic. It was a hand-held power mic.
For a shell, I used a custom license plate light fixture I had laying around my garage. I removed the bracket and it left a hole for the element to hear through. The slot the bulb was to shine through fit the volume control bracket perfectly into. I drilled a hole and installed a1/4 inch jack in the other end.
Yes, I got lucky. Also, I have experimented extensively with electret elements for PA use.
Last Edited by on Aug 03, 2009 3:02 PM
i started out with a lavalier mic and a ss amp. the tone was atrocious even with a boss digital delay to wet it up some. over the years i have owned probably a dozen amps and played through maybe 50 or 60.
my suggestion is, for practice forget a mic and amp altogether. save your $$ and buy a nice mic and amp that you can actually do something with later on. maybe wait until you've tried a dozen or so harp mic and amp combos so you know more what tone you like and want.
if it's more an exercise in building a mic, there are some great resources on the net. for a cheap piece of crap you can build a shell from fence post fittings or pvc fittings and put just about any low-z element in it. but i guarantee it will not be something you'll want to use with any regularity out with a band. the tone on a lot of low-z cheap elements is really just too thin to support harp frequencies. and since part of the tone equation is the amp a mic is plugged into, you may want to look for a good harp-friendly tube amp and a mic that will go well with it.
greg heumann is a master mic builder, and also rehabs kalamazoo amps for harp, for very reasonable $$. his work is flawless and he is a fountain of knowhow. check his stuff at blowsmeaway.com. i was considering doing a frankenstein job on a nos mic i bought last year, but after discussing it with him, decided to let him have at it. that mic is my premier mic now. he did great things to it so it would be totally harp friendly and easy to use on stage. worth every penny.
i used to swap elements around. i once fried a 1955 mc-151 crystal through ignorance. i used caulk to set elements into shells, which sort of worked, but there are guys building gaskets these days that are as good or better than the original ones. and when you caulk an element in you risk wrecking it if you ever want to take it back out. cable issues used to really plague me also. step on a cable on stage and you're out of commission until you can fix the damage. solder joints not stuck down well would come loose and again, out of commission.
i'm no pro when it comes to building or working on mics or amps. if it's past swapping a tube out or plugging a mic in, i've decided to let a pro handle it. i want instead to devote my time to actually playing.
Last Edited by on Aug 04, 2009 4:38 AM
OK, so I got all my parts; a couple of crystal elements from ebay, a pot, wiring, soldering iron and materials, wire and a couple ideas for a casing. I'm ready to go and am trying to put one together this weekend. I don't know if I have everything right (for instance, I think the POT is stereo) but I'm giving it a shot. What's the worst that could happen, right?
The worst that could happen? You can fry that crystal real easily with improper soldering technique. And don't drop it! Do you know that its good to begin with?
But no, you can't really hurt anything by wiring it wrong as long as you don't connect it to anything but the input jack of your amp. Why don't you start without the pot, just to eliminate confusion. 2 wires - simple. Get that working - then add the pot. Is the pot the right value for a crystal element? ---------- /Greg
http://www.BlowsMeAway.com http://www.BlueStateBand.net
Last Edited by on Aug 06, 2009 10:49 PM
OK, finished my first run at my mic yesterday and I'm pleasantly surprised. The Good: When hooked up to my Fender Frontman amp it has a nice, gritty sound. The Bad: On that particular amp I can't get a good, loud sound without a lot of feedback. If I turn the amp up to about 2 or 3 I get a ton of feedback. On an old Traynor (I think it's tubes) amp I get a decent sound with no feedback.
Based on Greg's comments I didn't install a pot the first time through because I was not sure if I had the right type. Could that be the problem on the first amp?
I found that soldering was not nearly as simple as I remember it from high school shop although as I worked through the project my 'technique' improved greatly.
I made a video and was going to add it to harpfriends on Youtube but I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. Should I just log in to Harpfriends and choose upload? If I do that how do I place the video in a playlist?
Note that the pot won't reduce or effect feedback just by being there. When feedback occurs you can turn down at the amp or turn down at the mic - either will reduce the volume to the point where feedback stops. Having a control at the mic is really useful because it allows you to adjust while not directly in front of your amp. ---------- /Greg
@Greg: Thanks for the info and kudos. So, if I'm getting feedback on the fender amp but not on the Traynor amp what's the possible cause? if I play through a normal dynamic vocal mic on the fender it plays fine (but a boring sound). Is it anything to do with the mic at all (like wiring?). Any feedback would be great.
Hey Jaymcc - I have a '67 Traynor Guitarmate reverb, and according to my amp tech guy, they are really trebley, so you have to change stuff inside to take that out, and I don't remember what he did. (That's not much help is it?) ---------- If it ain't got harp - it ain't really blues!!!!
"@Greg: Thanks for the info and kudos. So, if I'm getting feedback on the fender amp but not on the Traynor amp what's the possible cause? if I play through a normal dynamic vocal mic on the fender it plays fine (but a boring sound). Is it anything to do with the mic at all (like wiring?). Any feedback would be great."
OK. First the Fender amp probably has much more gain than the Traynor. Guitar amps were setup to enable feedback from guitars - which means the amp's sound has to vibrate the guitar strings hard enough for the pickups to pick up that signal and send it back to the amp. THAT requires MUCH more gain than for a microphone, whose job it is to pick up sound waves form the air, to "hear" the amp and send a strong signal back. Good mics have higher output than guitar pickups and couple to sound in the air better as well.
SO - reduce the gain of your Fender amp by subbing lower gain tubes in the preamp section.
When you play through a "normal dynamic vocal mic" - you get less feedback. This could be for several reasons. All other things being equal, modern vocal mics are designed to reject feedback by being fairly directional - they pick up the sound in front of them much more than the sound behind. A home brew mic won't do this. But I wonder - is your vocal mic a low impedance mic? And when you plug it into your amp are you using an impedance matching transformer?
Many people make the mistake of seeing a cable with an XLR plug at one end and a 1/4" plug at the other, and just using it to connect a low-Z mic to an amp. It will actually work, but not well. You're only getting half the mic's signal to begin with, and the mic won't perform properly unless it sees a proper low impedance load. Then the mic is much quieter at the same amp volume setting, and bada boom, bada bing - less feedback.
The CORRECT way to connect a low impedance mic to a high impedance input (like yours, and virtually all guitar/harp amps have) is to use a low-Z cable (XLR<-->XLR) and an impedance matching transformer at the amp to convert a) the connection from XLR to 1/4" and b) the impedance from low to high.
If two mics have different output levels, the hotter one will feedback first at the same amp setting, just because it is hotter/louder. This is just physics. If you adjust the amp each time you switch mics so that the output volume, not the knob setting is equivalent between the two of them, you'll find feedback will occur at roughly the same loudness.
i used a element from a broken karioke mic that the kids broke used a switch from a gas detection instrument and a 1/4 jack just like isaac said.. it was so easy.. took it to the harmonica club and everyone loved it. this 87 year old man would not stop playing it on his chromatic . oh i used i shell from some gas fittings .. did i tell you i am a gasman
@Greg: That's great information and explains a lot. I don't know much about the vocal mic (low/high impedance) and I doubt I'm using a transformer because there's nothing else on the line and I don't explicitly plug one in. I'm guessing the major issue is that the homemade mic is 'hotter' and is certainly NOT directional. Additionally, it sounds like this particular amp, since it is meant for guitar and not really for harp, will need some massaging to get it to sound right. Looks like "Dad" has a new item to add to his birthday wish list; harp amp:)
