Remote Recording
A pandemic-proof method to record an interview with someone that is far away.
8 min. reading time
The Problem
There’s a reason why reporters literally push the mic in someone’s face; the closer the microphone, the better the sound. So when the Corona-virus hit the fan, everyone was scrambling to get their ‘remote recording’ in order. How were we going to interview people if we could not even be in the same space together?
Luckily, listeners immediately dropped their high studio sound standards, and even the big radio stations were getting away with dodgy FaceTime recordings. When I started The Low Season I set myself a challenge to get remote recording down. And for those that are not so keen on going through the entire blog, I’ve come up with the following recipe for a successful remote interview.
Use Zencastr or Skype to conduct the conversation via a computer. At the same time, ask the interviewee to also record themselves locally with their smartphone, using a voice recorder of sorts.
I have seen and read many tutorials on remote recording, and most are excessively focussed on the technical aspects of the call. Over the past three months, I’ve conducted 127 remote interviews. This what I’ve learned along the way.
Prep your Guest
If you already feel a bit antsy about your first remote recording, think about your guest. Apart from having to answer all your questions, they’re now responsible for part of the technical side of recording as well.
Make sure you explain in detail (and well in advance!) how you’d like to record the conversation and what you expect them to set up. It helps to explain, for example, why you want them to use headphones or earbuds during the call (because it prevents your voice from bleeding into their local recording), or how the online recording environment (in my case Zencastr) works.
Preparing your interviewee and making them feel at ease with the set-up are essential to a great remote recording.
Take your Time
Even when everything is perfectly set up, and your interviewee is the epitome of helpfulness, something is bound to go wrong. The link doesn’t work, I can’t hear them & they can’t hear me, the internet drops… The list goes on.
Make sure both you and your interviewee have plenty of time, so that no stress seeps into the chat. For a half-an-hour conversation I usually plan an hour or more.
Studio Sound
It’s well known that we don’t live in radio studios. And it’s damn shame too, because if we did, we could avoid sounding like we’re all living in aquaria. How do we get that nice warm studio vibe from a remote recording?
Well, you can’t. For that you’d need, you guessed it, a studio.
What can you do? You can ask your interviewees to sit in the least echoey room of the house. Which in almost every single case is: the bedroom! Don’t worry, you don’t have to ask them to sit under a blanket. Just make sure that windows and doors are closed to avoid any interference from ‘outdoor’ sounds.
If there’s still echo/reverbaration in the recording and it’s freaking you out, here’s an amazing, though expensive, plug-in that can help you remove it in post.
Best Sound = Local Sound
This is probably the most important bit of this whole post. The recording itself.
There’s a ton of different ways to record over the internet, and we’ll get into some of the options down below. But for now, remember that the best sound is locally recorded sound.
But how do we get a microphone on location, preferably right under the nose of our interviewees? Big radio productions would actually send you a professional microphone days, or even weeks before the interview so that people can get comfortable with it. Alas, we don’t have the time, nor the money to send over expensive microphones.
Luckily, almost every single person has a really decent microphone in their pocket. Ask your interviewee to use a Voice Memo or Voice Recorder app on their phones to record themselves during the interview. (I use a an app called iTalk when I’m on the road and need to record something quick. It’s super easy to use, but it’s a bit of a hassle getting the file from your phone onto your computer…)
Here’s a recording I made on my iPhone 6S in my bedroom (in my own homebuilt studio). The only editing I’ve done is remove some of the reverberation with the aforementioned plugin.
The sound is very clear, has hardly any artifacts and with a bit of equalizing, you should be left with a very pleasant and crystal clear end result.
And just to give you an idea how good your smartphone mic actually is; here’s the same bite but then recorded using the inline microphone of my Bose QC25 headphones.
I’ve had a bunch of issues with people putting the phones on the table in front of them, or next to their laptops. You’ll always pick up laptop fans and the banging of feet and arms on the surface. So I recommend people to hold the phones in front of them during the interview, as if they were holding a microphone.
Earbuds / Headphones
Indispensable really, for any half-decent audio work. It might look a bit silly, doing a video-call with your headphones on, but we’re creating audio, so no one’s going to see you. (For good quality video’s I use the same procedure, and recommend everyone to get over themselves and let sound be beautiful and clear!)
Headphones and earbuds often come with a cable with a little mic attached to it. Which is great as a primary input for your online recording (we’ll get to that in the next bit).
I always ask people to wear headphones or earbuds during the recording. This way, they can hear me perfectly, but my voice won’t bleed into their local recording. One of the main difficulties with remote recording is the delay caused by our internet connections; you’re bound to talk over each other.
In order to end up with two separate and clean tracks for editing, you need to prevent your voice travelling through their laptop speakers and onto their local (phone) recording, and vice versa. That means using headphones or earbuds.
The Phonecall
If you want to create a true telephone-style recording, here’s a way of doing it. You need a recorder (in my case a Zoom H4n), a cable (either jack to jack, or a jack to XLR), and a headphone splitter.
Put the headphone splitter in your mobile phone, plug one end of the cable into the splitter and the other end into the recorder. You need the splitter to have an additional hole to put your own headphones in. Otherwise you can’t hear your interviewee on the phone.
It should look something like this:
If you’re using an XLR to 3.5mm jack cable.
Or if you’re using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm jack cable, it looks like this.
If you turn on your recorder now, it will record any audio from your phone. Whether it’s a phone or WhatsApp call, but also sounds from YouTube for example.
I’d only resort to a regular phone call if I’m running out of other options. The sound quality is often quite bad, and because your interviewee is using their phone to conduct the primary interview, there’s no back-up recording.
Bear in mind that it’s only recording audio it receives from your phone. That means you still need to record your own voice through an additional microphone!
Some people like the sound of the telephone recordings. Especially when the audio is only a small part of a bigger audio story. I’d argue that you can always add that telephone quality in post, using a filter. Similarly, it’s very hard, or near to impossible to clean up a bad telephone recording.
The Online or Conference Call
For the purpose of this blog, I’m only discussing audio recording here.
I have found two ways that will give you a decent primary audio recording. One is using Skype and something called Ecamm Call Recorder. The other is my preferred method, namely using the Zencastr website.
Skype doesn’t have a built-in recorder, so I’m using a simple application called Ecamm Call Recorder. It has a €40,- price tag, but a one-time payment will let you use it forever and ever. Once installed, you can set it up so that it automatically starts recording once you make a Skype call.
The Call Recorder records both ends of the conversation. Though, unlike Zencastr, it doesn’t record your interviewee locally. Meaning that Ecamm records what you receive over the internet through Skype (and what you hear in your headphones). If your internet is laggy, it will immediately affect your recording.
My preferred method, however, is Zencastr. It’s a website that records both of your voices locally and then stores it in the cloud for you to download. You also don’t need to separately install an application (Skype). You can just send your interviewee a link to the online recording environment. One click and you’re live!
Even though your recording is less likely to be impacted by internet failure, it’s not entirely flawless either. I did have some issues hearing my guests and sometimes the recording failed to upload to the cloud, leaving me with nothing. The website does not work on a mobile phone, nor with certain internet browsers (most notably Safari and Zencastr don’t like each other).
Keep in mind, the quality of the audio is as good as the microphone with which it is recorded. Even if the audio is recorded locally, if that local sound is recorded with a crappy laptop mic, you’re going to get crappy sound.
At the moment of writing this post, Zencastr is totally free to use due to Covid-19. The overall sound you’re getting is as good as it’s gonna get on the internet. Especially when you’re using Zencastr as a means to communicate with your guest (and the recorded sound just as a back-up), I don’t think there’s much competition.
Recap
So once you’ve found somebody you’d really like to interview, explain to them how you’d like to conduct the conversation.
Use Zencastr or Skype as a means of communication and as decent primary audio recording (a backup). Use a laptop or desktop to conduct this call.
Ask your interviewee to record a secondary audio recording using a mobile phone (or an actual mic if they have one!).
Take your time to set everything up and make sure everything is working.
Pandemic Mishaps
So your guests are prepared and are excited for the interview. You have mastered and set up the recording equipment and environment. One click and your guest is live. Or at least, so you thought.
For some reason the audio is coming from your laptop speakers and not your headphones, or your guest is live but you can’t hear them, or the internet drops on you halfway through the call - if there’s one thing this pandemic has taught me, it’s that the state of our internet connections in 2020 is really quite bad.
Something is bound to go wrong. Remote recording is an arduous process and there’s not much we can do about it. However, if you’ve scheduled enough time, if you explained to your interviewee what you’re doing, and if you have a back-up method of conducting the call, you’re going to be fine.
The most important thing is to recognise that something is wrong with the recording at the beginning of your conversation. Don’t hesitate to stop somebody from answering, or to re-do a part of the interview, if you think something is not right.
The worst thing - though not completely unavoidable - is to hang up after an amazing, in-depth and personal interview, only to realise there’s a super annoying beep or hum through the entire conversation. Listen carefully and spot those audio quirks in the beginning, and don’t be afraid to reschedule the interview to try and clean up the problems in the meantime.