Recording Telephone Interviews with a Cell Phone
About the recording
When I first asked Mark is he would allow me to record the interview he seemed concerned about the quality of the audio and wanted to get together in person. Since one of my goals is to teach new technological tricks, with special emphasis on ones that are easy and relatively cheap, I told him I wanted to do the interview over the phone. This way nobody involved was inconvenienced, especially Mark, who only gets to visit his brother in this area once a year. The last thing he needs is Clark Kent (minus the Superman aspect) showing up showing up at his brother’s house at 9AM. To the right are the components, and how they are used.
As you can see, the only parts that have significant costs associated with them are the Zoom H4 ($299 retail), possibly the cell phone (which must have a 2.5mm headset jack, or equivalent to match your headset) and the wireless phone recording controller, which is $24.99 at Radio Shack. You may be able to get away with a Bluetooth earpiece but I wouldn’t recommend it because that’s one more component to worry about battery life and signal problems.
The Velcro is optional. It was used because the wires and components were getting a little out of hand. I want this stuff to be as accessible and easy to use as possible so I am free to do other things while I'm recording, like drink some Jolt Cola or grab an Oreo.
This allows me to walk around with the recorder in my pocket, or I could get fancier and add a belt clip, all kinds of possibilities. I actually conducted the interview while walking around the house and yard a little. To the right is what I had to carry around.
Once the phone call starts, I was able to close the phone and put it in my pocket and continue the conversation. Of course, this required a little research and development so I called some friends up to test this on. Here’s a sample clip. Joe is usually a very happy guy, but this particular evening I caught him at work at 7pm or so. Be on the lookout for Joe, as he will be heavily involved in my "Research and Development" efforts, mostly as a guinea pig for me to experiment on with the techniques I'm learning and teaching. While I will try to keep the physical harm to "GP Joe" to a minimum, there are no guarantees!
Now finally we get to the post-processing. This was definitely the most grueling part because I had no clue about how to use the software. I’ve had no experience with audio editing software in the past so that is why this took so long to complete! I used the free open-sourced program Audacity, by Soundforge. It’s recommended by Berklee if you have nothing else. For a free piece of software it’s pretty powerful! There were some glitches which I plan to report, but overall, once I figured everything out with the online tutorials it was pretty easy. I had to rerecord a lot of my vocals because I sounding embarrassingly bad! I tell you, there is no better way to get better at something than to record yourself doing it! You think I’m bad now? Hah! Its Johnny Carson compared the original recording, which will remain in my private archives until I’m dead!
- Login or register to post comments
- Printer-friendly version
