Effective Old Tech

With those basics out of the way, let’s visit some of the stranger mics and techniques I’ve employed – some of these quite recently – that might cause you rethink how mics can be used.

Enter the telephone mic (seriously). I first saw one of these in the late 1960s while playing a country gig for Billy Dean and the Thunderbirds at a chicken-wire bar in the middle of nowhere. The bar owner’s advice was to keep playing when a fight broke out on the dance floor since the crowd generally didn’t throw beer bottles at the band as long as the band kept playing. And yes, there was actual chicken wire fence in front of the stage in case a stray bottle came our way.

Anyway, what caught my eye at this gig was the harmonica player using a telephone handset for his harp. Yup, just like one on an old dial-up phone. The decades have clouded my mind a bit and perhaps I imagined just imagined it, but then last year I was doing sound at a bluegrass festival and the harmonica player showed up with a – you guessed it – (now quite old) telephone headset for a mic. (So I’m not crazy and have pictures to prove it.)

Not only did this artist use the receiver/earpiece of a vintage Bell telephone, he plugged it into a modern build of a Fender 5-watt Princeton guitar amp. This was one of the most authentic sounding harp setups I’ve even experienced on a live stage, with the telephone earpiece providing the right high and low frequency cutoffs with the proper amount of squawk.

If you don’t want to roll your own harmonica mic, Shure makes a new version of its bullet mic (520DX) that’s also a favorite of harmonica players. This one includes a volume pot right where you can roll it up and down with the edge of your hand. Another sweet setup.

Noting Similarities

Now let’s mosey on over to another type of harp, this one being a classic string harp often seen in orchestras, as well as its smaller cousin the minstrel harp that’s often heard providing background music at weddings and high-end restaurants.

While it’s certainly possible to use a condenser mic on a harp, there’s usually a lot of other sound swirling around on stage so it’s difficult to get an isolated sound field. A winning solution is the Barcus-Berry piano pickup.

The company first sent me a unit a few decades ago, and I promptly used it on a variety of pianos with great success. In fact, we used a pair of them on a 9-foot concert grand for a live show with Ray Charles, mostly for the stage monitor feeds since they have excellent gain before feedback. They were blended with the input of a pair of AKG 414s in the house mix.

A bit later, for an outdoor gig with the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, I needed to mic the concert harp, which just happened to be next to the percussion section – there was no way that a conventional mic was going to pick up the harp and ignore the snare drum. Looking at the harp, I got to thinking that it’s built like a piano but without the hammers, and it also has a resonant chamber like a guitar with a sound hole big enough to reach a hand inside.

So with the harpist’s consent I stuck the pickup for the Barcus-Berry piano mic inside of the harp’s sound chamber with double-sticky tape and carefully threaded the wire out of the hole. And it worked great. I could get enough gain before feedback that the harp could easily be mixed with the rest of the orchestra, and with almost no cross-bleed from the other close instruments.

Interestingly, after I wrote an article about this off-beat technique for another publication, Barcus-Berry came out with the “Harp” version of this contact mic. I called and asked them the difference between the harp and piano models, and they said only the silkscreen on the front that said either “piano” or “harp.” Everything else was identical. After they read my article they realized it was also a great harp pickup and added that to the marketing.