The Difficulty of Re-recording the Hosts Track

Sometimes a great interview will be conducted but the hosts recording will be unusable due to glitching, noise, or any number of reasons.

Then someone will come up with the idea of the host re-recording all his/her parts, and matching that up with the original recording of the guest.

Firstly, in cases when the guest is a famous person who will not be available to re-record the entire interview, this idea is good, but not easy to pull off seamlessly.

Second, if the guest IS available to re-record the entire interview, I would highly recommend this!

Because…

When you’re going to re-record one participant and match it up to the original recording of the other participant, you have to take many things into consideration:

All the times that the two participants “stepped on” each other
All the times when the host interrupted the guest and interjected a thought
All the times that the host said “uh-huh” or “mm-hmm” while the guest was speaking. (Especially if the guests audio is ducking every time this happens)
The energy and “performance” of the hosts re-recording
Lining up all the pieces of the new recording with the original recording (Aaaaaah!)
Etc, etc.

Unfortunately, soon I will have to re-record one of my clients hosts and do everything I listed above. Wish me luck!

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2 Responses

Mike Thomas says:

March 23, 2019 at 1:49 am

This reminds me of when I used to work for WEA Records. When we had a new album being released and I wanted to get exposure of some big artist, but they had a busy schedule, I would create an Interview Album.

An Interview album would be a 12” record with suggested questions and each track would have the artists response. The idea being that the local DJ would ‘pretend’ the artist was with them, ask the question and then play the track as the response.

I think I still have a couple – Elvis Costello and Pete Townsend, I think.

I guess it’s a bit like Barry

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Dan says:

April 2, 2019 at 8:15 am

This is why I always try to record the guest on a separate channel with their own mic. Even with a cheap dictaphone type recorder you can plug a left/right splitter into the mic input and achieve the effect of a more expensive four track-recorder (you get two mono tracks instead of two stereo tracks but that makes no odds for interviews).

For face to face interviews I use two lavs placed as close to each person as possible with as much distance between the two speakers as possible.

For a phone interview I plug one mic in for the host and plug the phone directly into the other input so that each side of the conversation ends up on a separate track (plugging a lead with a TRS connection into a phone makes it act in the same way as plugging in headphones during a call, ie the receiver audio goes down the line to your recorder but the phone mic stays active so the guest can still hear you as if you were on speakerphone). You can even ask your guest to record themselves at their end and then delete the low-quality phone recording and replace it with their local recording.

By keeping each voice on a separate channel in this way it’s much easier to remove interruptions or isolate one voice when people are talking over each other.

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The Difficulty of Re-recording the Hosts Track