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CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
HARP MIC BUILDING
This tutorial guides you through building your own tone- filled blues harmonica microphone from easily sourced, inexpensive parts. It sounds great. Total parts cost between $30 and $70. Your labor is free. Assembly time runs 1-3 hours depending on your soldering skills.
HARP PLAYERS SKILL
The most important aspect of amplified blues harmonica sound is the individual player’s skill. Couple that with a microphone and amplifier, and you might find your own satisfactory tone. It will take a long time to tweak what how you want to sound. Most pros will tell you your acoustic playing should precede any work you do amplified. I agree. But there is still the lure of plugging a mic into an amp and having a wail with your harps.
James Cotton’s (pictured above in 1982) acoustic skill was superb, and when he cranked up the amp next to Muddy, it was a whole other world.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
BLUES MICROPHONE PARTS
Custom and off-the-shelf blues harp microphones are great. They come in all shapes, sizes and vintages. You can find lots of commercial and boutique vendors. Original finish, beat up, powder-coated, chrome, dynamic or crystal, most harp mics share four or five things:
a. Sound capsule, otherwise known as an element
b. Enclosure
c. Cable connector
d. Gasket fitting element to enclosure
The variables of these four or more components are immense. High or low impedance, electrical output, response curves, transformers, enclosure shape. I don’t understand half of the options, but with some experimentation, you can take the basic parts and build a working microphone with relative ease. Finding the individual parts is pretty easy, if you know where to look. I’m gonna show your where they hide, and how to put them together. We’re going to assemble this mic with inexpensive parts, so you can experiment a lot without breaking the bank.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
ENCLOSURE. THE SHELL.
There are literally thousands of things you can use as your microphone enclosure. Tin cans, pepper shakers, tea strainers. You name it, someone’s made a microphone out of it. Of course you can use a nice vintage shell like the common Shure green bullet, or an Astatic JT-30. If you find one at a reasonable price, by all means use that. But we’re going cheap, so we’re using one of the most popular options available. It’s a motorcycle turn signal light. Greg Heumann from Blows Me Away Productions was the first builder I know that used a motorcycle tail light as a microphone shell.
This shell is often a little small in diameter to hold for some players, but builders around the world are using it. As an alternative, there’s a larger diameter tail light that works well too, but finding or building the right gasket is a bit more trouble. Our primary shell fits the element pretty well, and you can buy a proper gasket online.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
TESTING
After playing each of the many elements, I slowly whittled the best-sounding elements down to 6. Building all six out, I then brought them to the New England Harmonica Intensive seminar, where I let all the players who cared to, try out the six. There were fifteen or so testers, including seasoned pros Annie Raines and Ronnie Shellist.
We used a stock Fender Blues Jr. as the amp in the tests. Not regarded as the best harp amp out there, but certainly available worldwide. After grading the microphones over a weekend, players evaluated two of the elements as standing out from the rest.
Annie Raines Video Link
Ronnie Shellist Video Link
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
STEP 1: DISASSEMBLE SHELL
Unscrew the shell grill and twist to remove. Might take a little work, cause there is a rubber gasket inside. Try not to break it. Open up the shell and you’ll see the lens and bulb assembly, attached to several wires. Cut them all and remove bulb assembly. Pull out the wires from the neck.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
STEP 2: WIRE THE CONNECTOR
On this connector, the center hole is the positive connection, and the outside is the negative (ground) connection. Start with the negative connection. It’s a tricky soldering task because the inside of the connector is very smooth.
If you’ve got a pin file, or a Dremel tool with a rotary cutting bit, you can grind a small groove inside the connector to better set the wire when soldering. I use black wire for the negative connection, and red wire for the positive.
Cut about 5” length of wire, and strip about 1/8” off the tip of each wire. Solder the black wire to the interior side of the connector, and red wire through the center hole. To keep these connections from coming loose, you can fill the connector with either hot glue, or silicone caulk.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
STEP 4: INSTALL CONNECTOR
Insert the wires into the neck of the shell, and screw in the connector. It will fit nicely if you tapped the shell first, but you can force twist the connector in as an alternative. I apply a little hot glue, or thread-lock liquid on the connector to make sure it doesn’t loosen after time.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
STEP 5: PREPARE ELEMENT
Most of the available elements have some sort of housing on the rear to fit various microphones. Generally these are simply hollow plastic or rubber extensions to the element capsule.
We need to remove the excess parts so the element will fit inside our shell. You can use a hacksaw, coping saw, or Dremel cutting disk for this job. Make the back of the element chassis smooth and level if you can.
Be careful with the wires inside the element housing. They can be used to connect to the transformer in the next step.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
STEP 7: INSTALL GASKET
This has always been a failure point in microphone building. For best results, the element has to be both sealed tightly to the shell, and isolated from vibration when in use.
You have a couple choices here. You can either use a custom rubber gasket, simple plumbers putty, or thin foam rubber to set the element into the shell. I found a roll of foam shelf liner that is just the right thickness.
By all means try the plumbers putty, or foam rubber, but you can get the proper-fitting gasket from Jeffrey Spoor here: https://jlspoor.com/t/ harmonica-microphone-gaskets.
CUSTOM HARMONICA MICROPHONES
MICS
STEP 8: ASSEMBLE GRILLE
If you have one handy, use a small bit of breathable foam inside the grill, which will stop some of the breath and popping noise the element will pick up without some cover. I found very cheap microphone wind screen foam on Amazon.
Press the grill back on and align the screw hole at the bottom. This may take some effort, as there is a silicone o-ring on the shell fitting, but be careful to avoid damaging the face of the element.
STEP 9: ATTACH MICROPHONE CABLE, PLUG IT IN,
AND PLAY
The connector we’ve used in this build is a traditional Switchcraft screw-on connector. Microphone cables to attach directly to this connecter are readily available.
If you want to use a standard 1/4” guitar cable instead, you can get an adapter between the screw-on and the 1/4” plug. The model is a Switchcraft 332A. Even if you use a screw-on cable, it’s handy to have the adapter around in case the cable fails. Then you can just use a guitar cord.
