Podcasters Emporium

Greetings gentlemen, and I’m not just saying that because you’ve given me a shout-out on the podcast. ;PI went looking for the old episodes of Richard Giles’ Gadget Show because I distinctly remember hearing Dave as the “Wannabe Geek” back when I used to listen to that particular podcast. The Gadget Show was one of my favourite TPN podcasts as well. Unfortunately back when TPN had that hacker problem and lost most of the achives, that show was lost as well. If anyone can find the MP3 file, have a listen to; “The Gadget Show #51: Wannabe Geek – How To Podcast Episode.”On to mic stands… As our intrepid listeners remember, I was looking at purchasing a podcasting rig of my own–both for experimentation and for the possibility of better educating my colleagues overseas on the ins and outs of typesetting and page layout in a Graphic Design studio (not to mention for my guest appearances on other shows).[Note to self; There's my idea of a podcast right there, "The Production Artist Show"] I haven’t yet purchased the aforementioned rig because of the unfortunate worldwide financial crisis we’re going through right now. In any case, I really wanted to get a boom for my mic and I had a thought on how to cobble one together on a budget. A low-cost boom, as Dave mentioned, is basically an arm that is counterbalanced with springs and what do I have staring me right in the face most of the time on my desk? A desk lamp that is attached to an arm counterbalanced with springs that clamps to my desk. Surely this is just the thing!?Here’s an image of a similar lamp.This light cost me approx $15 Canadian. The only downside is that the build quality of this arm is probably much lower than what you’d pay for a good mic boom, but the price is right.The light itself is attached to the arm by two rivets–These could easily be drilled out. The joints are all plastic which makes the arm fairly quiet when you move it, but means that it is also prone to failure if you move it around a lot. Next there are only a couple of screws holding the lamp assembly together, so it would be very easy to pull it apart until you have just the arm and the clamp assembly left. The only things I need to figure out is how to attach the mic holder to the end of the arm, and decide how to increase the tension on the springs because I’m assuming that the mic is going to be a little bit heavier than the light assembly was. A bonus with the type of light I bought was that it has adjustable tension bolts at each joint, so I could just crank those down a bit to offset the weight of the mic. I could also add a couple of paperclips to the springs to shorten them, thereby increasing the tension. Then it’s simply a matter of using zip ties (cable ties) to secure the mic cord down the back of the arm, making sure to leave an extra loop of slack at each joint and we’re away.If you didn’t want to clamp this rig to your desk, then you could run over to your local IKEA store and pick up one of their heavy cast iron lamp bases that they sell for a similar IKEA desk lamp for under $10 CDN. The only thing I find with the IKEA lamp of this sort is that the build quality is quite a bit lighter than the one I mentioned above and I doubt the arm would hold out to the abuse, so I didn’t recommend it.There you go gents…an idea for a cobbled mic boom.