Key Of Grey

January 14th, 2010 – Sometimes I have really stupid ideas, and they eat away at me until I have to do them, no matter how ridiculous. One of these has been a DIY windscreen, also known as a pop filter. For those of you who don’t know what it does, it basically blocks your microphone from some of the wind a singer generates when spitting out T’s and P’s.

Normally, these cost between 15 to 40 dollars (at least where I live) but the cheaper ones are basically a wire frame and some pantyhose. Of course, I wondered if I could really make one out of those materials which leads us to today, well yesterday really. While waiting for my mechanic to be free, I perused the nearby dollar store (actually $1.25 store, it’s a recession after all). There was some cool stuff in there, including some very beefy clamps, pantyhose, and a hanging clothes organizer…just what I needed for a DIY windscreen.

So today I set about making it and have photo documented it in all its glory. It is perhaps the cheapest “upgrade” to your audio set up possible. It will also be, almost undoubtedly, the ugliest thing you have ever seen if you have the limited skills I do. One last thing before I dive into the DIY part of this post: this by no means is meant to be serious, it’s all fun and games. So please…no hate mail.

Here are the materials I used: (1) A package of pantyhose (2) A hanging mesh organizer which provided 3 wire rings (3) A clamp (4) A wire coat hanger (5) If your clamp is too big to hold onto your mic stand securely, you should also use a rag or spare sponge to fill the gap and ensure a good fit (6) Duct tape (7) Zap straps

Cut apart the mesh organizer until you are left with three rings. I only used one.

I undid the coat hanger and removed an unnecessary piece of wire.

I bent the coat hanger so it would wrap around the handle of the clamp.

I wrapped the coat hanger around the handle of the clamp and duct taped it in place. Ah duct tape, the most useful tool in a person’s toolbox. Of course, I bought a generic variant. Real duct tape is pricey!

I attached the other end of the coat hanger to the wire circle I cut from the hanging organizer. I then threaded and bent the coat hanger around the wire circle. It didn’t work very well, so I had to use a lot of duct tape.

I cut the legs off the pantyhose and used the waist/bum portion to cover the wire circle. Because the circle was not particularly robust, I could not use the legs because they warped the circle into a pill shape.

The duct tape on the wire circle wasn’t holding so well, so I proceeded to use the other most useful tool in a budget handyman’s toolbox: zap straps. I also used it to secure both sides of the pantyhose around the wire circle.

The windscreen was now “done”. Time to attach it to a fancy German mic stand. It’s a pretty weird scene when a 3 dollar windscreen is clamped with a towel to a hundred dollar mic stand.

Check that out! Save for the towel, it could almost be professional!

Oh wait…upon closer inspection, not at all!

As I expected, the windscreen turned out unfathomably ugly. However, it actually does a pretty good job of blocking wind from the microphone. The biggest problem (other than the aesthetics) is that the wire in the coat hanger makes it hard to position the windscreen in front of the microphone.

I imagine that many of you already have all the materials to make this windscreen in your home. That would make this project a zero dollar windscreen. You could also just bend the coat hanger itself into a circle and attach it to the clamp directly. This would mean you could omit the hanging organizer too. It would definitely be uglier, but at least it wouldn’t deform as easily and would be more robust.

What did I learn from all this? Windscreens are absolutely simple and super inexpensive to make. That being said, I built this thing just for fun, it’s way too ugly to show clients. However, if you only record yourself and you want to save a couple bucks, this will do in a pinch. Stay tuned for a future segment where I use better materials and build a windscreen that you could actually be proud of showing off, or at least not embarrassed to use.