Speaker 1: I'm going to show you the method that I use to record phone conversations for the podcast that I host. This is the method that I use when I need to record both the sound of the person that I'm talking to on the phone and also my own voice to capture a conversation between us, what radio people call a two-way. For this method, you do not need a telephone. Don't need one of these. You don't even need a cell phone. What you do need is a computer with decent internet. You need a microphone and you need an external audio recorder, something that can handle at least two separate channels of audio. This is the Zoom H6, but the Zoom H4n would do just fine. The Marantz 661 would do just fine. Most of the popular field audio recorders would be able to handle this method okay. All right, let's get started. Now I'm going to place the call through my computer here. That said, my microphone I'm going to plug directly into my recorder via a standard XLR cable. My job is to connect the headphone output of my computer here to the recorder. I'm going to do that with this little mono eighth inch to mono quarter inch cable that I've got here. If you've got an eighth inch to XLR cable, you could use that. If you're going to use a cable like this, you want to make sure that it is a mono cable. How do you know it's a mono cable? There should be only one black ring on the tip. If there's two, you've got a stereo cable. When you try to connect a stereo sound source to a mono input, bad things can happen. Phase cancellation. Trust me, you don't want it. All right, eighth inch goes into the headphone jack. Quarter inch goes into one of my inputs on the recorder. Very good. Now I'm taking my headphones and I've plugged them into the headphone output on my recorder over here. This is how I'm going to monitor what I'm doing. We're almost ready to place the call here, but one thing to remember is that we're going to be recording the audio output of the computer. Anything that comes out of this computer is going to end up on the recording, so you want to close Facebook or an email program or anything that could make a dinging sound. Now I record using Google Voice. Why? Because it is free, unlike placing a phone call with Skype, which costs a per minute charge. If you have the latest version of Google Hangouts installed on your Chrome browser, you should be able to just look down here in Gmail and see this little phone icon. I'm going to hit that, and I'm just going to type in a number, and I'm going to blur it out so that you can't see who I'm calling. Hello? Hi, Melissa. How are you? Hi. How are you? Can you hear me okay? Yep.

Speaker 2: Excellent.

Speaker 1: Okay. Folks, the first thing that you're going to notice is that Melissa's voice is really, really overdriven. It's really, really clipped. You really want to lower the output of your computer to be closer to the kind of output that you would get from a microphone. For me, that's actually taking it basically all the way down to almost nothing. Hey, Melissa. What did you have for breakfast this morning?

Speaker 2: I had orange juice.

Speaker 1: You had orange juice. That's all you have for breakfast?

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Okay. Well, we're going to have to talk about that later. What I'm doing right now is I am adjusting the level up on my recorder just to get her a little bit balanced with me. Maybe I'll give it another notch or two on the old computer. Here we go. I'm recording on my recorder right now. I've got her voice going to one channel. I've got my voice going to another one. Something to bear in mind is that Melissa right now is not hearing me through this microphone. She's hearing me through the microphone on my computer. I'm simultaneously speaking into both mics so that she can hear me here and that the recording can get a nice, clean, high-quality mic recording of me right here. Melissa, what are you going to do this weekend?

Speaker 2: I'm going to Valdosta.

Speaker 1: Valdosta, the city of entertainment.

Speaker 2: Right. Okay.

Speaker 1: Now, folks, you might notice that the sound quality of her voice isn't ideal. That's not because the quality is being degraded by the connection that we're using. It's just because Melissa is talking to me on an iPhone and sadly the world we live in now is one in which most people that we talk to are on crappy cell phones. Melissa, thank you very much. Just to sing us out, could you recite the alphabet for me?

Speaker 2: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S.

Speaker 1: Beautiful.

Speaker 2: Thank you very much.

Speaker 1: You are relieved of your duties. Thank you very much, Melissa. Have a lovely day. All right.

Speaker 2: Bye-bye.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Bye. Then I can just go ahead and hang up right there. Now, in that example, I placed an outgoing phone call. You can get an incoming phone call on Google Voice as well as long as you request a Google Voice number. They are free. You just request one and they send it to you. And then you give that number to the person who's going to call you. And this is what it looks like on your end when they call you. Hello, me, how are you? I'm great. Thanks. Now, when it comes time to edit, things just couldn't be simpler. You just throw your two tracks into a multi-track editor and you have independent control over both voices. Here's me. So, Melissa, thank you very much. And then here's Melissa.

Speaker 2: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P.

Speaker 1: Beautiful.

Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Q, R, S.

Speaker 1: Pretty sweet, huh? Have fun with it.