The Waveform #014: Eighty Dollars Well Spent

A delay pedal I have wanted for two years went on sale this week at roughly the price of a month of office electricity, and I closed the tab with the smugness of somebody who has lost that argument before. There is a particular guilt attached to expensive equipment you are not yet good enough for. The best equipment in this office is not the most expensive: it is whatever is within reach and does not cause a panic when it falls over.

The $80 Mic That Refuses to Die

Petra Lindqvist makes the case for the cheap dynamic mic that keeps turning up on records whose budgets could have bought forty of them. Her argument is not that it sounds better, because it does not: it is that it survives, it flatters nothing, and it makes singers stand close enough to mean it. There is a short buying note at the end for anyone starting from zero.

Also this week

• Postcards From the Reykjavik DIY Circuit. Five rooms in five short dispatches, among them a swimming pool, a fish plant canteen and a lighthouse, none of which were built with music in mind.
• Moth Choir's 'Cathedral of Small Sounds'. Twelve people, one church and contact mics on everything, reviewed by someone who treats dynamic range as a moral position rather than a specification.

One more thing

The tape I have played most this week cost less to make than this newsletter costs to send. 'Dubs From The Landing' by Pigeon Post: four songs recorded on one dynamic mic in a stairwell, sixty copies, dubbed by the singer's brother on a deck that wobbles. Side two is the same four songs with the mic moved two floors up, and it teaches you more about reverb in twenty minutes than most textbooks manage in a chapter.

See you next Friday. Ada