Voice Acting Storytime: What Recording In An Airbnb Closet Taught Me

Since this is my first proper post, I thought I’d share another first: my first recording. I admit it was nothing too exciting, but I think it's an important memory. I mean how else am I supposed to know if I’ve gotten better? The whole point of this blog is to track my growth, and help others learn from my experiences after all, so why not start at the beginning?

My first recording happened at the most inconvenient time, right in the middle of a weekend trip with my family, to an Airbnb in Auburn California. I hadn’t realized that Fiverr had an out of office mode, and so I went without knowing the implications of what that meant. This would be a mistake as four hours into the drive I got a notification that I had just gotten my first Fiverr gig. This was great news! I had finally managed to get a job, and I was going to make sure I did it well! Until, I realized, I had no microphone. Which led me to realize that I had nowhere to record. And no editing software either. This was terrible news.

For the first part of the trip, I was a bit frantic. Even when we got to the Airbnb, I was a bit of a wreck. How was I going to pull this one-off? When my family started to relax around the house, I was checking every nook and cranny of this place. It probably looked really strange, like I was trying to find something I had lost, but my family ignored me for the most part, they did stop me to offer me some soda and to join their board game, which I ended up doing (Curse my ability to get sidetracked so darn easily!). Luckily, after looking through the entirety of the house, I decided the best place was the closet that I started my whole search with.

Great, now I had a place to record, but what about everything else? A mic? recording software? editing software? After searching my belongings, and some of my families, I realized the only mics I had were built into my devices. I tested out both my phone and laptop microphone, and decided quickly that my phone was better. So despite not having a microphone, I made do with my phone. That covered the mic problem.

So what about software? Well if I was going to record on my phone, that meant using apps that would work to record and edit from my phone. I downloaded about six recording and editing apps, then narrowed it down to the best ones. Finally, I was ready.

So then I enjoyed my vacation for a day while I put off trying to work.

After I got in some R&R, I shut myself in the closet and instantly started recording. It wasn’t a challenging read, it consisted of a long 4K list of words to read for people trying to learn English. However, both my parents walked in on my recordings and as I was still a bit embarrassed about the whole thing, I ended up just trying to shoo them away for about five minutes each while they asked several questions. This, of course, was all recorded. So after about 45 minutes of recording and re-recording the list, I finally finished. Well, finally finished the recording part. The worst was yet to come.

I’ve always hated the editing process, always. But lying on a couch listening to my recording and editing it on my phone after eating a great meal is probably one of the best editing sessions I’ve ever had. Even so, It took me about 2 and a half hours to completely finish editing the entire file. And when I finished the end result would be great for the time I was recording, but looking back on it now, it was pretty awful.

I sent in the video and not only was the client pleased, but they also sent me a $10 tip. I was pretty gobsmacked by this and made sure to thank them and let them know I’d always be happy to help them if they ever needed me. I then proceeded to have a very good vacation with my family and made sure to never leave the out of office off while I was on vacation again.

It was a pretty fun project, and I wouldn’t change how it went, as it was fun in the end. But I would never allow myself to stress that badly on a break day like that since. The moral of the story is to try and balance your work life better than I did, and also to have fun while recording as much as possible.

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