Philip, I've known you a long time. Kevin Robinson [Viva Voce, Tape Op #84] was the one that was telling me, "Dude, check these out. Talk to this guy."
That's one of those "so lucky I started this in Portland" kinds of things. Because he, for whatever reason, thought that first batch of mics that I was doing were cool. He sent out an email to everybody he knew in Portland music and was like, "Hey, there's this guy in town doing this cool thing." That connected me with a whole bunch of good people, including you. You came over shortly after that when it was in the basement.
How "Portland" is the basement, right?
Yeah.
A million bands started in basements, many studios, many businesses.
Well, the clearest impetus was my daughter, Malachi, who now helps me run the business here. When she first started writing songs, as she was heading off for college, we had some discussion of, "I guess we should figure out how to record some of these." I was doing some audio stuff. I was tinkering in all kinds of different areas just to keep my sanity from my software job that I hated.
Which is something you did for a long time?
Yeah, I'd been doing that for a couple of decades. To keep my sanity, I did a whole bunch of different projects, physically building things like pinhole cameras in the evenings. I have never been a good or serious guitar player, but I got into making amps and converting old tube PA heads into guitar amps. That was the first electronic stuff I was doing. Then I did a preamp. I don't even know why, because I wasn't recording anything, but I got more and more interested in that kind of gear. Right around that time, Malachi wanted to track some of her songs. I was like, "We'll need a decent microphone. Oh, these are expensive."
Yeah, the good ones are!
Because I was in that headspace of building it myself, as DIY as I could, I looked into mic circuits and building your own mics. And there's a little bit of an internet community around that. Enough at that point to be like, "Oh, it is possible."
Right, DIY groups.
I hadn't done much transistor-based circuitry at all. It had all been tube before that. I didn't know that much about the circuitry, but most mic circuits are actually pretty simple. There are not that many components. They're pretty easy to understand. There are some very specific design considerations, mainly around noise.
Why was it condenser mics? Phantom powered condenser mics seem to be your bag.
Yeah, and partly because those were the circuits that were easiest to find. Although there's a little more to the circuitry, it feels like you're building something yourself. The trouble with dynamic mics is it's basically the capsule is the mic. You don't even need anything else. A [Shure SM]57, you can even use it without the transformer. But making those capsules is complicated. I didn't want to DIY the capsule building on this, especially on those. With condenser mics, the capsules are fairly readily available, and the circuits are pretty doable. It felt like something I could get in, and tune, and control… a way to do something that is your own design. You can do slight modifications to existing capsules. The revelation to me was anything can be a mic body. It just needs to provide the shielding. It needs to be metal all the way around. As long as it's fully shielded, the design could be anything.
Did you have to start understanding the acoustic considerations of where the capsule's sitting?
Yeah. Then you get into actually making one and listening to it.
[laughter] And wondering why.
And wondering why, exactly. It was still probably a year and a half of tinkering and trying a bunch of different body configurations. Even when settling on things that seemed pretty good, there are a lot of details about exactly where the capsules sit in the headbasket. The different headbasket...
