How to have a cleaner sounding phone interview

Actual screenshot of the audio samples in this post. Notice how the guest’s volume is much louder (in fact, it’s overmodulated) than the interviewer’s volume.

When recording a phone interview for your podcast, one of the smartest things you can do is to put your microphone source (that’s you) on one track of your recording (track one), and your phone input source (your guest) on another track (for example, track two). Feed track one to the left channel recording input in your recording software program, and feed  track two to the right channel recording input. In other words, you’ll be on the left channel and your guest will be on the right channel of a stereo recording. That way, if your guest makes unwanted noise while you’re speaking, you or your audio engineer can mute your guest’s recorded track in post production (and vice versa in case you make unwanted noise).Let’s listen to a before and after example of what I’m talking about.

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