Recording Audio
Being good at interviews, and audio editing are both skills that can support other media making but are important on their own. This page outlines the steps of how to structure an interview, how to edit audio and other resources available.
Creating Interview Content
Picking the right idea.
Basically, anyone can conduct an interview and post it online now. But what makes interviews worth watching is the structure, research, and topic development. When thinking about your topic, take into account your audience and think of podcasts or interviews that you’ve really enjoyed watching or listening to.
Questions to think about when developing your interview topic:
- What is the interview is going to discuss?
- What is the goal of your interview?
- What do you hope your audience learns about the concept/theme/topic?
- What professional fields interact with this topic?
- How can you create a frame around the information/topic/concept to give context to your audience?
- What is interesting to your audience?
From here you can make your first draft of what the structure will be in your podcast. Below is a version of a common and very broad structure used by many well-known podcasts. This by no means has to be your structure, but you do need a structure! So be creative and come up with a plan that works for your idea and topic and tells your story most effectively.
Do your due diligence!
Research plays a larger role in audio interviews than you might think. Creating a good audio interview doesn’t just involve knowing enough to come up with questions and find who you’re interviewing, it also includes you the interviewer being knowledgeable enough to come up with questions on the fly. Think of good interviews you have listened to, do they just list off questions and have people answer? Or does the host try to connect with their interviewee and ask unplanned thoughtful follow-up questions? Turning your interview into a conversation rather than just a list of questions someone asks might bring up information or answers you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Takeaways:
- Learn as much about the topic as you can!
- Figure out who you might be able to talk to about your information/topic/concept.
- Pull out information and notes to be able to have a thoughtful and knowledgeable interview.
How do you ask the right questions?
Now that you’ve done your research you are able to craft the questions for your interview. There are a few questions you will likely have every time like “Could you please introduce yourself, and tell me about yourself?”.
Outside of that, your focus will be on open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are questions that allow someone to give a comprehensive and dynamic answer. (Closed-ended questions can be answered with “Yes” or “No,” or they have a limited set of possible answers.)
| Open-ended | Close-ended |
| Can you tell me about your day and how you feel? | Was your day good? |
Your questions, and the order you ask them in, will act like a loose structure as you conduct your interview. They help to make sure that you cover the information you want, and knowing that gives you the ability to think about how you will transition between questions and ideas during the interview.
Planning out your recording session.
While it is just as easy as hitting record, you need to be thoughtful of a couple of things.
Where are you recording?
Where you are recording is just as important as what you are asking. Is there background noise? Are there comfortable seats for you and your interviewee?
How will you record?
More than even finding out what microphone you can use, make sure you test your recording technology before the interview. If you need to, also show up to your location and set up a bit ahead of when your scheduled interview time.
How long will you need for the interview?
The tricky part here is you need to balance having enough time to get through all the questions you want to, but you also have to be mindful of your interviewee’s schedule as well as your own! Ensure that you record longer than you think because you will lose time when you edit.
What are you asking?
Be prepared, you already have planned out your questions but make sure to practice them and think about what questions you want to say in what order to add to your story/narrative structure. However, it’s important to also be flexible and open to where the interviewee might take the story.
Asking for an interview.
When reaching out and asking for interviews, don’t hesitate to shoot for the big ones and ask someone you think might not say yes. If you ask someone if you can interview them, and they aren’t interested the worst they can say is no! That’s not a super bad outcome as far as undesirable outcomes go. So take the risk, you might be surprised who you can get to talk to you.
When asking someone for an interview it’s important to:
- Explain who you are and why you are doing an interview.
- Explain your topic, the intent behind the interview, and what you are hoping to cover.
- Give the amount of time the interview will take (including set-up time if needed).
- Offer to answer any other questions they might have.
Once you receive a yes and your interview is scheduled make sure to do a bit more research on the person you will be interviewing. Doing this can help them feel more at ease, and help you ask more thoughtful questions.
Your recording session.
Now that you have your plan, and you’ve gotten an interview it’s time to record. By now you should have your structure, your questions and be good to go. The biggest piece of advice is to go to your location and test what recording there will be like! Record enough audio to hear any problems you might have like echoes, and even bring a friend to act as a second voice. Another important thing to remember is to make sure to let the guest(s) speak! Be flexible, and ask follow-up questions if you feel like you’re guest is talking about something interesting, or brought up something you think you might want more depth in for your recording.
Take a listen/look at the examples below and watch how each person interviews. Take notes of things you find important!
Takeaways:
- Record longer than you think!
As you edit down your audio to meet your vision you’ll likely cut some things out, or remove “ums” or pauses. All of these things will cut down the final run time of your audio. It’s always better to have more than less. - Be flexible!
You can use your loose structure of questions to make sure you cover the things you want to, but also remember it’s important to leave room to discover and explore more outside of the straight answers to your questions.
More than just the interview.
Once you have done your interview you will better know how you want to frame your interview(s)/story and what audio will do that best. Adjust your first draft structure to fit how your interview turned out and ensure you plan the best way to maintain the story or narrative. Then you are able to find or script the framing audio.
The Intro and Outro
Making a finished product includes providing more context around your interview. For example, when you are listening to a podcast do they just dive in? Or is there a little intro to orient the listener to what’s going on, who they might be talking to, or where they are? Outro’s are also important as they can provide a recap for the listener, provide a call to action, and provide a more natural end to the story/narrative arc you are trying to achieve.
Other audio
Music can be used to transition between your intro and outro, or at times worked into the interview depending on your topic. The music you choose would likely be related to the topic you are discussing. Talking about rock climbing? Likely you’ll use something upbeat. Talking about meditation? Something slower and calming would make more sense. This can help you frame the interview, but also prime the listener’s emotions and mindset.
When we think of sound effects we generally think of very animated sounds like a classic boing! But sound effects can also be things like the sound of wind and a babbling brook, it can be the crackling of a fireplace. Sometimes using sound effects can help tell your story or narrative better than music would be depending on the emotions or mindset you want your audience to have.
So both music and sound effects are great audio tools to help you with your story. Both can be used to support your narrative and add information or context, so make sure to use these tools!
Pulling it together.
Now that you have all of your audio clips it’s time to use your plan and edit together your audio clips into the final form of a full interview recording or podcast. Depending on your content and final vision you might have a lot of editing to do. Or you might just want to make your audio a nicer listening experience by adjusting background noise, and ensuring there aren’t huge pauses to keep the flow.
Something you can do to make editing easier:
- Have the outline of your structure out while editing to guide you.
- Leave more than enough time to edit. It can sometimes be the longest part of creating an audio interview story/podcast
- Have help! A few people editing are able to bounce ideas off each other which helps to avoid tunnel vision.
- Depending on how much editing you have to do, break editing up into blocks of time and take breaks!
Editing is project and skill-level dependent but you are encouraged to challenge yourself. Audacity is suggested as it’s free, can be downloaded to both Mac and Windows computers, and is simple to learn. However, you can use whatever audio editing method you are comfortable with.
Quick and simple Audacity Tutorial for Beginners:
More in-depth beginner walkthrough:
Putting it out to the world!
Whenever you see an audio post, or podcast typically there is a small write-up that helps to entice the audience. It’s important because it can help you catch a member you want as your audience that your organization may not have been able to catch yet. It also allows the audience you already have to get excited or informed enough to engage with your media again. Overall it’s a small amount of info that can have a big impact!
For the purpose of this class, all you have to do is create a post including your write-up and your audio file. To do this you have to create a post, add the appropriate block, and upload the file to your media library.
Do your research, and craft good questions but still, make sure you have a conversation.
When you interview someone having good questions is only half the battle. Sometimes people get nervous when they know they are being recorded, or they don’t know what to say other than a very specific answer to your question. This is where having a conversation and being able to think on your feet comes in.
Some of the best interview responses you get when recording are the little snippets you didn’t expect. Watch/listen to some of the examples below and notice how the interviewers are interacting with their interviewees. Listen to how the interviewers craft the conversation around their questions.
They are flexible or quick with knowledgeable but related follow-up questions, make their guests feel comfortable and open, and are able to hold a conversational element to the interview. Think about how that lends to making the interview better, and how different it would be if they just stuck to their scripted questions. In some examples, they verbally put their audience in the room of the interview by adding details and information about their surrounding. All things add different storytelling elements to their narratives.
Examples
Audio Interviews / Podcasts
1. Author Richard Wagamese on his novel Indian Horse
In her interview with author Richard Wagamese, Shelagh Rogers asks questions and describes settings to engage the listener and set them in the room of the interview. She asks thoughtful questions and allows the interview to naturally flow.
2. Questlove On Prince, Doo-Wop, and The Food Equivalent Of The ‘Mona Lisa’
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the drummer and leader of The Tonight Show’s house band The Roots is interviewed by Terry Gross about his at the time new book, life, music and more.
Previous Semester’s Examples
Other Interview Examples
(We are not asking you to do a video for this, these are good interview questions/conversation examples!)