Hey guys, recently I've been experimenting with lo fi equipment to help get a truly raw sound. Here's a video where I test out some of my homemade gear, is anyone else into this kind of thing?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ty9C7cm_c&feature=plcp

A few years ago, you could buy these really shitty, black plastic "Phillips" brand Karaoke mics at Wal-Mart...
Those were my favorite mics.

They sounded trebly, shitty, and harsh, and they fed back great (plus they had 1/4 jacks, so I could plug right into FX pedals).

I bet you could find those on ebay or something easily. Sounded way better than nicer mics, I think. I broke two of them after a lot of throwing them around though. I still have the diaphragm of one of them wrapped in tape with a 1/4 output soldered on though, and it works fine (plus, it's super-compact)

Contact mics are nice too... and so are crusty thrift store tape recorders.

PS: Youtube tells me the video is not available, so IDK what kinda sounds you're actually going for.

I may have posted the wrong link, this one should work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ty9C7cm_c&feature=plcp

yeyeyeye.

speakers/mics are the same thing.
you can make a pretty hideous (though the sound is probably very different depending on the exact unit) distortion/mini-amp by soldering a 1/4 jack to the playback head solder joints of a cassette player.

I do like doing this kind of shit. I haven't done a whole lot with scavenged speakers, but there's a lot of possibilities.
I did make a (terrible) "reverb tank" with a PC speaker mounted into a toy metal 18-wheeler... it just made everything have a kind of dull, metallic sound... not really "reverb" at all.

but it sounded lo-fi, for sure:
http://www.mediafire.com/?aefwb8mnk3so94f

It also produced a whole lot of feedback...

just crinkling tape makes stuff sound pretty grody too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTUWlKkxaAU

If I remember correctly, the tape to make that loop was pretty well fucked up.

Oh man, that "reverb tank" sounds so raw. That's awesome.

You can use headphones as a microphone. The earliest Burzum recordings had the vocals recorded that way. I've even done a few scratch tracks that way myself, and I thought the vocals sounded really cool.