Recording - October 2020 - 28

Talking Mics
with

Massy

You mentioned carbon mics-other than a few
companies like Placid Audio and Wasaphone, that
technology is all but dead.
Well, they're not really high fidelity. Even the most sophisticated carbon mic doesn't have the frequency range that you
find in other types of mics.

coconspirator] "Someone took the guts out of this. This isn't worth
anything." And he looked at it and said, "No, no, no, no. That's the
microphone!" The little stick is called a carbon pencil-basically a
suspended burnt stick-you put wires on both sides of it. On one
wire, you put a charge of 6v DC and connect the other wire to a
speaker of some sort, maybe in another room, and you could hear
the person from the other room. Basically, it's the first carbon microphone built by David Edward Hughes in 1878. I actually brought it
into a session, hooked it up, and it worked-mind blown!

What did you use it on?

I used it on vocals. It's very hollow-sounding and not very
good fidelity-wise, but this was the first carbon mic. It wasn't
until later that they took the carbon and made it into granulated
carbon sand, then packed the granules into a capsule and put
an electrical charge on it.
Another forgotten mic style is the crystal microphone. They
are not very popular now except with harmonica players in the
various bullet-style mics. The crystal mics are made from a slice
of actual quartz-a thin slice of rock. It's suspended in such a
way that it picks up vibrations and actually creates a piezoelectric charge. The problem with the crystals is that they deteriorate over time and stop working. They swell and break, so it's
hard to get a good working crystal mic if it's got some age on
it. You can actually make your own crystals with Rochelle salt.
If you culture the salt into crystals, you can cut your own slices
and make your own microphones. I want to try that someday.

Photo by Sylvia Massy

Have you thought of doing your own Sylvia Massy
signature mic?

Photos by Sylvia Massy

And you literally have to beat them.

You've got to shake them up to activate the granules. I just remembered a mic in the Paquette collection, which is really important in
mic history. It's just a little wooden box with a hole and a hinged
door on one side. When I opened it, I thought, it's empty except
for this charred looking stick. I said to Chris, [Johnson, Sylvia's
28 RECORDING October 2020

I want to create a set of three 50s-style cast nickel microphones,
each with its own character. One would be a dynamic, one would
be carbon, one would be maybe a crystal or a condenser. They
would each have their own unique color or flavor. You would buy
them in a set of three, and I don't want them to be too expensive.
With the Paquette collection is the possibility of reviving designs
that have been lost, including the glow discharge transmitter that
I showed you. There's a professor at Princeton who we've been
in discussions with about recreating the plasma microphone in a
much safer format, but still based on the original technology.

Maybe 2020 is not the time to be messing with a
plasma microphone, I've seen many movies that start
that way.
Right. [both laugh]

Recording - October 2020

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