hydrophones & contact mics

Wanted to buy some, does anyone has any experiences using them ?

Let me know,

TAF:

You can make your own, if you want to.

I've used a hydrophone a couple of times, and it's quite cool but each time I came back and listened to my recordings I thought to myself, "Wow, these all sound the same". I once used a hydrophone which apparently was pretty expensive I couldn't really hear the difference.

Contact mics though are amazing. I've been planning on making one or buying one.

contact mics literally cost about 15 cents to make. You can do lot of stuff with them, like coat them in rubber and freeze them in ice. :)

Thanks for the DIY idea, i've googled it and it gave me tons of promising results. I'd like to build many of them, and put them all over my body and record, then mix the output and turn it into a map of bodily sounds. Awesome.

ya go for it. Just experiment!

  On 3/10/2013 at 5:46 PM, the anonymous forumite said:

Thanks for the DIY idea, i've googled it and it gave me tons of promising results. I'd like to build many of them, and put them all over my body and record, then mix the output and turn it into a map of bodily sounds. Awesome.

Let me know if you figure out a good way to do this. Keeping contact mics on my body was frustrating for me.

you can also get hydrophone like recordings by sealing a mic in a condom, there are several DIY faqs online on how to do this safely without destroying the microphone

  On 3/12/2013 at 5:46 AM, Awepittance said:

you can also get hydrophone like recordings by sealing a mic in a condom, there are several DIY faqs online on how to do this safely without destroying the microphone

but then wouldn't the sound be a little muffled ?

you can also coat the mics in plastic (the type of plastic used to electrically insulate hand tools). and yeah, contact mics are fantastic. recently turned a banjo into a pretty raging psych machine by just making a contact mic w/ a 1/4" jack running into a cheap delay pedal.

If you don't feel like making your own hydrophone, I had this company recommended to me:

http://www.aquarianaudio.com/hydrophones/stock.html

I picked up the XLR one last year, and it's awesome. I've also seen this site mentioned:

http://contactmicrophones.com

  On 3/12/2013 at 10:28 AM, the anonymous forumite said:

 

  On 3/12/2013 at 5:46 AM, Awepittance said:

you can also get hydrophone like recordings by sealing a mic in a condom, there are several DIY faqs online on how to do this safely without destroying the microphone

 

but then wouldn't the sound be a little muffled ?

a little but it works, i've tried it and got some really usable recordings of it that sounded pretty similar to an average hydrophone

I have two contact mics from this guy

http://hydrophones.blogspot.com/

they are the c-series. I think they are good and not expensive for a professional product. I don't know how they compare to the ones you can make yourself, but they are dipped in rubber and feel solid and sound good. Attaching them to stuff has been the difficult part. Sometimes I use Topstick (two sided wig tape) and other times cut little pieces of velcro to attach them to. I tried recording my stomach gurgles but it was hard to breathe and keep the mics still enough. Maybe I'll figure it out someday.

I used the iphone mic to record stomach gurgles; it turned out surprisingly well!