www.beatmag.net/february06/technical.htm
Beatmag's regular technical columnist James Spectrum (AKA Jari Salo of Pepe Deluxe) takes a trip into the world of infomercials
One might easily dismiss infomercials as The Man's most demonic plans to paralyze the working class. Independent Research shows that, as a braincell killer, 30 minutes of infomercials clearly outperforms a heavy drinking night between Friday and Sunday.
A much less known fact is that infomercials are also one of the greatest knowledge databases of the western society. While it does take some skill and patience to find the nuggets in mountains of completely useless data, there are many answers to questions that practically no one has ever bothered to ask:
Q1. Why is NASA having huge brain-drain problems with their Mars program?
A1. Male 'actor' Scott Styles, while promoting ExtenZe pills, revealed that he's an ex-atomic physicist who left the space agency because of it's lack of female porn stars.
Q2. What does a fish biting a lure sound like?
A2. Very VERY boring... but, hey, thanks to that crappy idea Aquasonic went bankrupt and now you can get underwater mikes practically for free (to be honest that's about what they're actually worth).
Q3. What's the only surefire way to hear some wicked fuzz guitar in your radio?
A3. You gotta read a bit further for that!
Q4. Where does William Orbit's Bassomatic name come from?
A4. A Saturday Night Live parody of the Veg-O-Matic food slicer by Ronco.
It's not a big surprise if you have heard of Ronco, the company of millionaire inventor Ronald M. Popeil, as his television sales technique might be considered the very origin of infomercials. He's one of the few people who can challenge Arnold Lastnamenotnecessary when it comes to killer catchphrases: "Just set it and forget it", "But wait, there's more" and "Hey good looking, we'll be back to pick you up later."
That last one is from a '70s TV-ad where a dude driving a convertible used Mr. Microphone, a had held mike containing an FM transmitter, to broadcast his message of love to the ladies of the 'hood. The ones that were listening to a radio tuned to approximately 88.1 MHz that is. Answer number three, we're getting closer!
Mr. Microphone is simply a magnificent piece of badly constructed low quality no design garbage. I got mine NOS, still in original plastic wrapper. While trying to shelter my eyes from the sight of the orange-colored clown nose pop-filter, I tried turning the tuning dial (you can adjust the transmitting frequency) and it broke down immediately.
Remember we're talking about studio-mouse forearm power here, I usually have to use slip-joint pliers to open jam pots. Next thing to go was the power switch. Inspired by the passive resistance of the components and the egotistic desire to hear our own music on the radio, it was time to turn on the soldering iron and start hot-rodding the mike.
After some experimentation we were happy to discover you could simply insert another pair of wires in parallel with the microphone capsule in order to send signal to the radio transmitter. The wires were soldered to a standard ¼" guitar jack mounted in a small aluminum box. Line in to mike, voila! Playing a guitar loop on a sampler connected to Mr. Microphone's input, the dial on the (color-matching) vintage Siemens radio was slowly turned ... and hurrah! There it was, the guitar coming from the radio, and what's even better: it was completely and utterly distorted.
Hmmm... we might be into something here...
It turned out that as the input circuit of the transmitter is designed for very quiet microphone levels, it clipped hard when driven by line level signal. The good news is that the resulting fuzz was nice, compressed and smooth. A3, here you go! Now only thing missing was line out from the radio; another jack with a switch that
bypasses the speaker when a plug is inserted, mounted on the bottom right corner of the radio. The world's first wireless fuzz, now with extra wires!
Here's an audio clip of first tuning in, then turning (the volume) up and finally dropping out on Mr. Microphone.
Right click here to save.
www.beatmag.net/february06/technical.htm
