Official Channel for Metal Marshmallow LLC, a company that designs high-end contact microphones. This channel is all about our microphones and how to use them.
Hi, Great informative video. I am interested in buying the DIY kit but wondering if we could use a plastic box instead of metal to eliminate the need to ground the box? will that affect output?
Hi, the box needs to be grounded metal to prevent the mic from picking up electromagnetic radiation and humming at 50 or 60 Hz. you could use a plastic box but you would have to line it with metal foil or conductive paint and ground that to prevent hum.
4 years ago I harvested my own Rochelle Salt using basic chimestry... seeing your video excite me because I now understand I forgot to add a 3rd pin for ground... Back to the lab!!
option 4: DIY. take a phantom power mic preamp circuit, a psu filter, and a reamp circuit (or just an op amp with fixed -20dB gain if you're not feeling fancy), and put them in a box together. ideally one of the funny little octagonal ones that come with free chocolates. re: pedals and reamp boxes: any guitar pedal that's using any kind of high impedance buffer (op amp, BJT emiter follower, JFET gate follower, whatever) will not really notice a reamp box. a circuit that "interacts" with the circuit it sees at the input such as a passive wah pedal or some tube amps will notice the difference since they expect to see not just a certain impedance, but also the inductance and capacitance of a real guitar pickup.
This is really cool! Have you used different types, strengths, or a combination of both variations of magnet in the design? If so, what were the results?
Love this! Did you get hassled by security at all? I find so often when I'm trying to sample something in a public place that some petty tyrant with a rent-a-badge assumes I'm a terrorist and shoos me away.
Luckily I did this very early in the morning mostly while standing on the public sidewalk. I went back in the evening to get more footage of the sculpture and a rent-a-cop showed up out of nowhere but to be fair I was lying in the fountain with my bike and a camera. I still got my footage though
I made my own preamp with the MM kit, and can confirm that it's the same with my homemade piezo mic's. Turning the potentiometer down and the recording volume up solves the problem. I actually have up to 4 piezos connected to the same preamp.
Cool idea but the reverb sounds kind of muddy / boomy. First thing I would try is placing your driver and contact mic a bit differently maybe try avoiding the middle of the washer and keep both more towards an edge or corner rather than center. Next I'd try eq on the reverb. Try eq'ing the send and/or the return to and from your washer. Low cut and even cutting up to 200 or 300hz will probably help things. Also boosting high mids and highs I would think may produce interesting results.
I'll point out a few issues with doing it this way and a couple of solutions. First is there is a boxy frequency range thats present when using painted surfaces. Enamel and other paint acts like a dampener on very low and high midrange upwards. Second if its a piezo doing the picking-up then they have a hard scoop in the low midrange. The solution to this is to cut the boxy frequencies and boost the low midrange and highs until the sound feels right. Another solution is to find a really nice, big bit of flat steel that is unpainted and suspend that. The lack of suspension on the washing also presents some issues with the way the sound gets transferred as it wont freely vibrate the way it could there.
Another thing you could do is playback the signal into the plate at 2x speed, then bring it back down to real speed and it'll double the length of the tail and sound like a larger room.
Hi there! I was wondering you are shipping products to Romania, Europe. I am interested in buying Marshmallow DIY Phantom kit from you. Let me know when you get the chance. Thank you!
Hello, I would really like to get this microphone, but I have no opportunity to buy it in my country, I live in Ukraine, I have an unusual question for you, could you send it to me, I can pay to any details, if this is difficult for you, just ignore this request, thank you.
Well, I clicked bc it looked like this might go in a field recording direction. I was hoping you were using a big grain silo or something as your reverb plate. I loved the classical guitar on the pointy shred axe.
x10 was very good. cant say was it realistic or not because ive never ever seen such caves, but other in other cases its as if you had actually recorded vocals and guitar in a tiled bathroom. unbelievable quality. i need one of these contact mics, probably ill cannibalize some of my mics to make it diy. great video, subscribed, liked, etc!
It would be so cool if you could describe your whole process, the software you use for making the impulse responses. That would certainly be super helpful. What a wonderful video, what a wonderful way to show how easy it can be, could you possibly also link the kind of power amplifier you used or tell it here in the comments :) wonderful wonderful stuff!
The software for making the impulse response was Room EQ Wizard, it is just a few clicks to play the sweep, then there is an option to export the impuse response as a wav file. My power amplifier is an AK170, which is an unbranded thing you can get from many sellers for under 20 USD. I haven't used it with actual speakers, but glancing at the board inside it appears to be surprisingly well-designed for the price.
@@metalmarshmallowllc Thanks a bunch for that quick shot, nicely written and informative answer! Im very happy to have found ypur channel, having trained my algorithm well enough to get this as a recommendation :) i plan for building spring, aswell as plate reverbs for a long time, but have for a long while omitted the way of trying it with cheap gear and things, but wanted to go for the higher quality stuff instantly, which really brought down my plans of even starting more and more. Cause figuring out which neat and powerful amp id use and where the heck id get an actual surface transducer that was used with emt140 plate reverbs back in the day and which microphone combo... just broke my brain a little... so yeah. Input like your video is really welcome in my brain cause it illustrates the possibilities really nice and gives a better opportunity to play with the idea of it all. So i will build 1-2 smaller ones until i attempt the huge original emt140 sized that i need to wall mount at my place :)
Here's an idea for a cool spring reverb that I proof-of-concepted once: Get an old, broken mechanical clock. If it's not broken, break it. If it has an alarm, you will find two spiral springs, otherwise break another clock if you want stereo. Connect the centre and the outer end via a long stiff wires to piezo acoustic elements. You will need some amplification and impedance fiddling, to get audio into one piezo and out of the other. voila! I was really surprised how good this experiment sounded. I called it "Clockwork Reverb". edit: I just noted, this is a company that makes contact mics, so use those instead of the piezos
