Knowing when to cut down banter proves a tough challenge in audio recording
The most recent episode of Green Around the Quills, I hosted my first guest: Leigh Anne Treistman, my coworker and newest adviser to Caney Creek Student Media. As an adviser out of her first full year of experience, she had a fresh take on what she could have done better and what works well.
Equipment, Software and Challenges
We recorded the interview in an empty classroom at our school after the second day of school using an iPhone 12 Pro Max. To cut down on background noise, we chose a location away from vents and covered the phone with a cloth before recording that helps cut down on pops and other quieter, distracting noises.
In post, I chose to use Adobe Audition to edit, which proved to be a quick and efficient choice. This was especially helpful because Treistman was farther from the phone than I was. As a result, she was much quieter than I was, which resulted in having to do more nuanced edits to raise her voice but not mine.
The audio levels for hers needed to be raised about +6Db whereas mine actually needed to be lowered at times. For her, this caused some hissing where the white noise of the background was amplified, and mine sounds muffled at parts.
Time
Although this was recorded for a grad school class, I wanted to potentially continue this podcast and needed to exceed the 10 minute time limit to retain much of the conversation we had.
Treistman and I can talk for hours as we are both passionate about this subject. As a result, I had to find moments in the interview to either shut down the conversation to move on to another question, ask a follow up to go more in depth, or jump back to a topic I forgot to address earlier in the interview.
One tip that I retained from my undergrad (frankly, just from muscle memory) is to not audibly respond or acknowledge her answers like you normally would in a regular conversation. Instead, I would nod my head to show I was hearing her answer so I wouldn’t “step” on her answers.
Not interjecting made editing in post SO much easier when there were lots of “ums” and “uhs”. I left some in because otherwise the conversation felt less natural and almost sterile.
Theme
Finally, because I can’t help but have consistency, I chose to use the same music, intro style and outro style so that the branding stayed intact. The same is true for the imaging, which I used Canva for and just changed out the episode information before uploading to SoundCloud, which was a pretty painless process overall.
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