OT: Telephone Mic

[{ antonio }]

i know this is off topic but . . .

years ago i saw a schematic online for a telephone mic.  since then i havent been able to find one.  

i wanted to know if any of you diyers had seen this or have built one before.  i just wanted to build a dry telephone mic for our studio.  

please let me know if anyone could assist witha link or a schematic. or even a way for me to build one myself.  

i am only a 2nd semester electrical engineering student . . . so i still have a lot to learn.  thanks.

shalom & godpseed.  anotnio.

[Nasse]

If you mean "telephone simulator" or lo-fi effect I think there is one at GEO.

You could design one by combining filtering and distortion, maybe telephone freq range is 300-3 khz

I think someone has recorded some lo fi guitar or vocal lines by playing trough small and crappy amp and speaker placed in a tin can or tube, and just pick that sound with mic.

I have one circuit around somewhere, but where is it?

[{ antonio }]

i was looking into making a telephone mic from a telephone handset.  thats what i orginally wanted to do.  

hopefully i will find that schematic.  because whne i plug in in directly into my amp the thing just squels.

thanks though for the reply.

[Mike Burgundy]

a regular phone mic is waay too sensitive to plug it into a guitar amp and expect it to behave.
Try using a rather steep parametric set to 1KHz, and some not too over-the-top distortion after that. Could be a cool toy, and it's pretty close to the "telephone sound" with some tweaking.
That said, I've recorded with old phones as mics and it's cool - just bloddy difficult to implement with speakers.

[AL]

Try singing into a speaker phone and micing the speaker.  I did that years (whooaaa years?? ouch!!) ago.  It got that great Bad Brains "I against I" sound.  You could try plugging a CB into the PA - used to do that out of necessity in High School.

AL

[mattv]

Tape Op magazine had an article on turning a handset into a microphone. It may be on their website.  IIRC, all you do is wire the phone mic to a guitar cord. I'll see if I can find the issue and scan it or post the steps.

[{ antonio }]

i think i saw that article in tape op years ago.

maybe thats where i saw this.  

but if you could find the article and post it, that would be great.

thanks.

[brett]

If you boost a mic signal to instrument level, the LoFoMoFo circuit of Tim Escobedo's makes an excellent lo-fi effect.  I increased the 220pF cap to 1nF to let a bit more mid-range thru.
cheers

[cajununicorn]

i've built several of these. what you do is use the earpiece, not the mouthpiece of the phone. the mouthpiece doesn't have enough output. you simply wire a 1/4 jack on to the leads of the earpiece....what we used to do was switch them (inside the phone) if possible. sometimes both pieces are the same size, sometimes you have to rig it. with the elements switched and a jack on the end, you can sing and play with it on your shoulder...it looks really crazy,too. mind you, older phones with large parts work the best....especially rotory phones.

[Snoo]

Yeah, a band I know uses one of these on a song (www.bigjoan.com)

They use the earpiece not the mouth. Gotta watch the feedback!

[MarkB]

wasn't 'I against I' actually recorded over the phone?

I thought I remember a story that the singer was in jail and recorded his parts from the payphone.
"-)

[cajununicorn]

you know, i heard the same story....h.r. sang "sacred love" from a jail cell! weird.

[mattv]

The Tape Op article says to "toss" the earpiece speaker and use the mouthpiece mic. I dunno. Why not try both?

[AL]

You know now that you mention it I seem to remember reading something about "Sacred Love" and a jail cell.  There's a book called "American Hardcore" which is sort of a history of punk rock.  It's a collection of interviews and I think they mentioned something about that.  That's pretty funny -  a jail cell phone call started a whole generation seeking out "the sound".

ME