Us Americans are wimps. Scandinavians know how to test music gear. As a metal soundtrack pounds away in the background, a Shure SM58 gets subjected to some serious torture testing, including:

• Being used to hammer nails
• Dropped a couple of meters
• Frozen
• Dunked in water
• Driven over by a car

And then something really nasty happens involving Heineken and a microwave.

Mats Ståhlbröst, diabolical creator of this insanity, explains:

We wanted to find out if the SM58 can live up to its [reputation as the toughest mic in the world] and decided to put it through a series of tests. PS Studio is Scandinavia’s leading magazine covering music production.

Of course, Shure had no part in these tests … wait, they actually did? (I’m going to start requesting review units from these guys!)

The Swedish Shure distributor supplied us with an SM58… and I think both they and Shure should be pretty happy with the results. This is one tough mic. :)

I’ll say. There’s a reason the SM58 is a favorite in live venues. You have my permission to keep this a secret and tell everyone to keep babying your mics, mind you.

Sing along:

BLOGG.
INTERNET.
GLOBALISERING.
PIRATKOPIA.

Wow. I suddenly feel really depressed. I think. Actually, maybe I’d better watch that again with my Swedish-English dictionary handy this time.

The YouTube community in general seems to be all about Kraftwerk. Where else would you find people sharing video evidence that Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” employed a bleepy portable music toy called the Bee Gees Rhythm Mach– wait a second. Forget about Kraftwerk for a second. There’s a Bee Gees Rhythm Machine? Now that’s a beautiful thing. Have a look:

From the author:

Further adventures in extreme music geekdom. This is me playing Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” on a Mattel Bee Gees Rhythm Machine keyboard, followed by Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter playing the song live on their Mattel Bee Gees Rhythm Machine. Except theirs has all the Bee Gees decals removed so that the audience won’t mistake them for the Bee Gees. You can also see this keyboard on the “Computer World” LP jacket. The other hand-held noisemakers are a Stylophone, TI Language Translator (same sound chip as the Speak & Spell), and a home-made electronic percussion trigger.

For you trainspotters out there, this was not the first time Kraftwerk used a Mattel-derived instrument. The choir and string sounds on their mid-late 70s albums were played on a Vako Orchestron, which was an offshoot of the Mattel Optigan, which those sounds were originally created for. More info at my website, www.optigan.com

Optigan.com is a fantastic website, incidentally, with lots of resources for lovers of Mattel’s obscure, celluloid disc-playing “sampling” musical machine. There’s further commentary on YouTube about the Casio VL-Tone, Stylophone, and even a DIY instrument also being incorporated into the song. (maybe just the album version, I gather?)

Now, I dare someone to make a new version of Pocket Calculator:

• Featuring the TI-81. (Or whatever you kids are using now; I haven’t done my maths in a while. I expect real pocket calculators are now capable of hosting VSTs.)
• In Finnish.

Go.