Back in April, I was poking around an audio production group on Facebook. I came across an incredibly cool, handmade product that I instantly knew I wanted to add to our studio lobby.
Leen Wouters, a sound technician and artist from Betekom, Belgium, got an idea one day for a cool lighting fixture. It involved taking real, honest-to-god microphones, ripping their guts out, and converting them into a chandelier for her living room. From that first project, a business was born. Leen is now the proprietor of Microphone Mania, a web store that sells a variety of light fixtures — yes, chandeliers, but also single pendants, sconces and desk lamps — all made from real microphone bodies and parts, and all hand-built by Leen in her studio.
Recording studios tend to have somewhat boring, cheesy, or hackneyed artwork (cue the lava lamps and a couple of lame strands of Christmas lights). So we are always looking for interesting, unusual, and thematically appropriate design ideas for our studio — stuff that not everyone else is doing, and which belongs in a studio environment.
With that in mind, you can hopefully appreciate how cool I thought Leen’s creations were. I especially liked her lights made from real Shure SM58s. The ’58 is an absolute workhorse mic, and with its iconic silver windscreen, they are easy to spot on stages and screens everywhere.
I reached out to Leen a few months ago, telling her I was exploring the possibility of hanging a series of her SM58 pendants from a track lighting grid. I thought it might be fun to add a bit of recording studio-themed accent lighting to the lobby. It also seemed like a funny idea — a studio (jokingly!) named for a place where politicians and secret agents go to hide, having a series of lighted microphones “listening” to you as you enter the studio.
I purchased one SM58 pendant from her shop, which she sent prepped for me to connect to my track lighting grid. I had no trouble hooking it up and hanging it.
Honestly, that first light was actually a little TOO bright. The microphone’s windscreen casts a grid shadow on the wall, and while it’s an interesting look, in our 22-feet-below-street-level facility, the effect felt a little too much like a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. We’re going for secret lair chic, not torture chamber chic.
But Leen also mentioned she was starting to offer red LED bulbs with her fixtures — what she calls the On-Air Edition. Studio denizens around the world know that the red light means “recording,” so it’s a very appropriate color for a microphone-themed light fixture. And in our case, the dimmer glow of a red LED makes for a much better “accent light” sort of vibe — almost like the glow of vacuum tubes in the back of an amplifier.
So we decided to go with red LEDs instead. The effect was MUCH cooler, and I went ahead and ordered the rest of the 3×2 grid of fixtures from Leen’s webshop. Today I got the last of them wired up with adapters for the track lighting rails, and…
They’re REALLY cool! The red provides just a bit of color without casting any weird shadows around the room.
I have a thing for mic flags — those little geometric shapes that fit over the microphone’s body to provide a little visual “branding” for the broadcaster or the name of the event. On-Air Mic Flags does excellent work and I have bought a number of designs from them for various events and organizations I’ve worked for over the years. The studio lobby is an excellent place for a “trophy case” of mic flags from old events I’ve done. And of course, I have a set of mic flags for the studio itself!
Thanks to Leen Wouters for all her help with this little project. Our SM58 pendants are a really cool addition to our studio vibe! Please visit Leen’s shop at MicrophoneMania.com, and let her know you saw her work at our studio!
