Here is something I look at several times a year ever since my father bought it for me in 1966. Also, I’m trying out my new scanner, a Canon 5600F. How does it look?

This is the actual “tacky little pamphlet” which I discovered in my parents bottom dresser drawer. I believe it may have played a role in how I turned out. I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. What do you think?

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Here are two slightly different views of my Electro-Voice DL-42 shotgun dynamic microphone. I think this model was manufactured in the 1970s. It is similar in appearance to the older 642 which won an Academy Award in 1963 for technical achievement.

This is the original recording from 1970 or 1971 as heard on the Negativland album “Points.” It features my mother playing accordion and my aunt singing. The voices of my father and a cousin can also be heard. This is part of a college drinking song from Cal Berkeley and you can go here to see more information about this song. I used a Calrad 500c dual crystal microphone for my aunt and a Calrad DM-59HL dynamic microphone for my mother. Separation was about 25 feet with my mother in the kitchen and my aunt in the living room at my house in Martinez, California. The tape recorder was a Sony 560D running at three and three quarters inches per second, which my father recently purchased from White Front on Contra Costa Boulevard in Pleasant Hill, California. There is a little distortion on the side where my aunt is singing which is most likely due to the mike preamp in the recorder being overdriven by the Calrad crystal microphone.

In addition, the Calrad 500c has what I think is a cult following, as it is used as a “dummy” microphone on infomercials and it seems to be somewhat collectible as seen in this link. I bought mine in the late sixties for ten dollars from the now defunct Olson Electronics.

Calrad 500c Dual Crystal

Calrad DM-59 HL Dynamic

Sony TC-560D Instruction Manual

Part 1

Part 2

Here are the original recordings that I made with my mother in the early 1980’s. I used my Superscope C-104 monaural cassette recorder. This recorder has a line input and automatic record level only, so the sound is quite compressed and noisy. Also the room (my bedroom in Martinez, California) didn’t have much to absorb the sound, which accounted for the reverberant sound quality.  I think I used Sony F-98 dynamic microphones  and an inexpensive older RadioShack mixer with no level meters. I may have had my dbx 161 compressors in line as well and as far as I know there was never a stereo version of these recordings. You can hear how Part 2 was used on the third Negativland release  ”A Big 10-8 Place” in the piece called “180-G: A Big 10-8 Place Part Two.”