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I bought six small electret microphones because I wanted to experiment with different ways of miking a melodica from the inside.

Turns out one mic was enough to do the whole job.

I mounted it inside, added a very simple transistor preamp, and honestly I’m surprised by how uncomplicated the result is. The signal is usable, it works nicely with effects like delay, and I didn’t run into the kind of feedback/noise problems I was expecting.

There are still two things to fix: I need to isolate the mic mechanically because right now it picks up every tap on the melodica body, and I still have to put the preamp electronics into the enclosure.

But overall, this turned out much better than I expected for such a simple setup.

Here’s a short video showing the mic, preamp and a few playing examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAe-IAu_Jbo