How To Make a Cheap Recording Mic
I was doing some reading on how to make a cheap recording mic out of electret condenser mics, then found these really neat reading lights from the dollar store that were perfect for housing them in, so here’s an article on how to make one.
So first you will need the reading light, I got mine from the Dollar Tree, your local dollar store might have different stuff, but these ones already came with batteries, a switch, a clip and everything so they were perfect.
The only other thing you will need is an electret microphone, some wire, a female 1/4″ phone or XLR jack, and maybe some aluminum tape. You can get an electret mic from radio shack for like $3, and depending on how much you want your project to cost either a female 1/4″ phone (cheaper) or XLR (more expensive) jack from radio shack also, or you could shop around online.
Anyway now you want to take the light all apart. Just unscrew the top, and use a tiny screwdriver to take the bottom part off.
Then just snip off the LED, solder a couple of wires to the two battery terminals at the bottom, and hook up either your 1/4″ or XLR jack.
You’ll then want to solder the mic on, be careful because it does matter which way it goes, make sure to align the positive and negative terminals correctly. Also the reason I solder the mic last is because you can ruin it with your soldering iron if you apply the heat to it for too long.
After that you just gotta put it all back together, I used a piece of poster putty to hold the mic in at the top to keep it from rattling around, another thing I did was use some aluminum foil tape and wrapped it around the flexible part to shield it, it’s kinda expensive though so if you have a better idea go for it, I just happened to have some so I used it.
That’s pretty much all you need to do to make a cheap recording mic. You could also add a capacitor and resistor to the circuit to keep the switch from popping when you turn it on, but good luck trying to fit it in the already tiny space by the batteries, of course it might fit at the top where the mic is. If you want to try here is the website that I got most of my information from: http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/microphone_powering.html
