First thing that comes to mind is Matthews. The lower stand definately needs to be a heavy-duty light stand. Take a look at their wwwsite for options.

To extend a 13.5 foot light stand, Wes Dooley sells an adjustable pole that adds 7.5 feet. See the link:

http://www.wesdooley.com/aea/Modular_Microphone_Stands.html

Wes also sells a 20' medium duty stand.

I would go the dooley route.

Or, you could always buy a heavy duty light stand for photo lighting - but to honest - a 20 footer will set you back FAR more than the dooley option. The only problem is, I believe they are out of stock of both of them right now.

J.

If you can still find the Bogen 3076 (aka "Highboy") lighting stand, you can put small-diaphragm mics up 17 feet high. I wouldn't use it for heavy mics, but it is great for anything up to the size of a stereo pair of Neumanns or Schoeps or something...

--Ben

We made a really tall stand out of a tripod speaker stand, a pole that was used to cleanout the bottom of a swimming pool and a microphone stand we found in the junk. It works GREAT I can get up to about 20 feet and it is very very stable. All the parts are held together with a bolt and a wingnut so the whole thing can be assembled very quickly and taken down just as fast. All the tubes fit inside the one below it with only the bolt and wingnut to hold them together at the proper places. It costs a total of about $65 and that was for the speaker stand which we got at Sam Ash for a bargin price because it was store damaged (read paint scraped off) a quck spray wth Krylon semi gloss black and it looked like new. We can put our Decca Tree with three 4050 microphones on it and not have to worry about it crashing down.

The pool cleaner rig and the microphone stand both came out of the junk pile in front of a person's house.

Best of luck!

Tom...that is priceless!

I've been checking with some oilfield buddies...oddly enough, there are sucker rod adapters that, when modded, can work perfectly for this...

(A sucker rod is not what you think... :shock: ... its one of thousands of metal pieces that lock together to actuate a pump 5000 feet below the surface....gets the crude oil moving up...)

I had no idea a tall piece of metal with legs and some threads on top would cost $400....man.... :( I guess a DIY approach is in order...

The Matthews mic stand is 25 feet.

Manfrotto makes an extension that goes on a 5/8" spigot, maybe 7 feet? They also make one that fits a 1-1/8" spigot if you have access to a crank-up.

The bogen/Manfrotto stands are considerably cheaper than $400. I think my 3076s were something like $125/each (definitely cheaper than Shure's tall stands). The Talon stands I have only go up about 13 feet, but they are air shocked as well. I got those for about $75/each...

--Ben

I never seem to see them mentioned here but my favourite off the peg mic stands are made by K+M (Konig+Meyer). For tallish stands I've got a bunch of their type 20811

which goes up to 4.4m on its own and takes the K+M 21231 counterweighted boom arm for another 2m. You can set the 20811 to full height and position the boom fully extended, horizontally and the stand remains rock solid; it's still stable with one of Wes Dooley's 2.5m trees at full height. If I pop the rubber end cap off a carbon fibre fishpole I've got, it'll slip over the extended boom on the K+M stands and give me about 3m more reach/height on the boom. A bit of gaffer tape secures it to the boom and stops it twisting.

I've also got some of the 5.5m Manfrotto lightweight lighting stands (sorry, can't remember the model) which are great for small/lightweight mics but can get rather unstable at full height. To fix this I use a water fillable plastic ballast (got it from a camping store) and some heavy duty bungees to hold it down. I find the water ballast is less hassle than sandbags (most concert places have supplies of water even if they lack a handy source of sand). When I'm done I can empty the water and the plastic container weighs next to nothing.

For more height and/reach there's the Ambient Recording booms (fishpoles). Their range includes a "Jumbo" boom which can be fitted to one of the heavy Manfrotto lighting stands and extends to 11m.

And for pipe organs and really hard to get to places I've got a Clark Teksam S QT 15/HP pump up ariel mast which goes up to 15m with a 2.5kg head load. (Clarks make a huge range of masts for civil and military use covering a wide range of heights and headloads).

Being bright yellow in colour, it's not the most discrete mic stand in the world; not a disaster on sessions but for live work it's a bit bright! However, it's still very useful (and you can always spray it black like I did with mine :wink: )

The Clark Masts looks very interesting, website : http://www.clarkmasts.co.uk/qtm_masts.php

It even seems to be possible to order the tripod in other collours than yellow.. I belive this is a product that will rice to the top of my wants list!

/ptr