The Microphone That Saved My Ass

How Radio Shack used to be a cool thing. -by Larry Crane

Does anyone else remember how Radio Shack stores used to have a “FREE Battery Club”? It might have even been before high school that I found out about this. My mom seemed to always be taking us to the “new” strip mall between Grass Valley and Nevada City in Northern California, where we lived, and there was a Radio Shack store that I would frequent. I think the free batteries kept me coming in!

As I began mucking around with recording to cassette (pre 4-track cassette recorders), I would drop into Radio Shack and look at all the fun things that I could buy. My first microphones were some battery-powered condensers Radio Shack made, and they came in a case like this.

I was taking electronics classes in high school, and Radio Shack had many of the parts and tools I would need to etch my own circuit boards and build crazy oscillators. I even built a passive mixer in high school, but by that time I think I’d found catalogs of electronics places that had surplus parts and such for cheap. Like a bag of random potentiometers for $5! I do remember owning a Radio Shack mixer for decades. It also was battery-powered, with a 9v compartment underneath. There was no other way to power it! It was super helpful for how I would bounce from cassette to cassette deck doing reduction mixes while adding new tracks. I guess I forgot to include this mixer in my earlier post on consoles!

Our band Vomit Launch began in my last semester of college in 1985. By 1988 we’d self-released two albums and were signing to John Baccigaluppi and Rich Hardesty’s record label, Mad Rover Records. We began work on our third album, Mr. Spench, in John’s basement (the original Enharmonik Studios) and his drum overhead mics were Radio Shack PZMs, also battery powered though he and Rich had figured out a way to power them externally (upping the voltage helped) and you could wire them up for XLR balanced output as opposed to the stock unbalanced 1/4-inch connector on the end.

The PZM mics followed over to Enharmonik Studios’ second location on 15th Street in Sacramento, and I remember them mounted on some big wood panels on either side of the drum set when Vomit Launch recorded Boltcutters & Beer and Dogeared in 1991.

The first issue of Tape Op featured an article I wrote about the PZM mic in 1996, though I think the initial schematic was wrong. I think Rich Hardesty and John sent me something that I drew incorrectly. Oops. My PZMs got a lot of use in my home studio, Laundry Rules Recording, between 1993 and 1996. Records like The Maroons’ I Am To Blame used these mics, which were mounted on masonite panels screwed in at angles above the drums. Because of the nature of a PZM boundary microphone, it won’t have the same phase relationship that a typical mic would have with other mics on the same drum kit. In other words, one doesn’t need to worry (as much) about the snare mic and the overheads being out of phase with each other. See my Quasi post for how that can go wrong! I think that by using these mics in my tiny basement home studio I was able to get far better results than if I had used typical small diaphragm condenser mics as drum overheads. They didn’t pick up the bad tone of the room, and they kept a good phase relationship with the other mics used. I was always thankful to John and Rich for turning me onto these mics.

These PZM mics are still at Jackpot! Recording Studio, and now have the cool power supply and audio electronics by Northwest tech legend Rick Chinn. They certainly don’t get the use they used to, but the remain an important part of my recording history. When Elliott Smith and I moved into Jackpot! we each had one Audio-Technica PRO 37R mic, so now we had a pair. I don’t think I used the PZMs much after this, though I remember once taping them back-to-back and putting them above a drummer’s head for a pretty cool overhead sound – until he stood up fast and the corner of the mics punctured the top of his head. Oh man…

But these are the mics that saved my ass in the past for sure.