This afternoon my dad and I recorded an interview for Divaville Lounge. He talked about when he first got interested in swing music and hot jazz, told stories about great concerts he saw back in the day, and introduced some of his favorite songs. I think it went well! I tried to strike the right note between maintaining a conversational tone, and letting Dad talk without interruption. He had notes to read from so that he wouldn't get stuck, and I think he did a good job of not sounding like he was reading a script.
The technical side worked out well. I didn't want to do the interview live because I thought it would just be too much stress. And I didn't know how much time the interview was going to take & wanted the ability to edit it if necessary. Most importantly, I have no idea if the instructions on how to patch in a phone call even work. (In fact, just a few days ago another dj reported that it doesn't work. Thank goodness I had already decided not to do that way!)
Instead my dad got set up on Skype, and we talked over our computers. The sound quality was much better than using a phone. I used Audio Hijack Pro to record the conversation. It's a terrific program which can be set to only record audio from a specific program, not any other source. Which was great because I didn't have to worry about accidently making my computer beep and that getting into the audio file. I used the highest quality setting for the recording, and the resulting file, for 45 minutes of audio, was 500 Mb!
At first it was strange, to be sitting at my computer reading PSAs and saying "You're listening to WXDU Durham" as if I was on the air. I joked to my dad that I needed to close my eyes and pretend I was standing in front of the board talking into the big mic. Still, I got used to it pretty quickly, and I think we both sounded comfortable. I have no experience with looking at printed dialogue and figuring out how long it will take when spoken, so I had no idea how we were going to do on time. As it turns out, we were pretty close to my goal. I'm going to time it out and make sure we have enough time to play all the songs we talked about. I'm hoping I won't have to cut anything.
I'm going to edit the interview over the next week, break it into tracks and put them on a CD. The show will air next Sunday, September 23. I hope everyone will tune in for my dad's on-air debut!
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