A salesman set it up. I had no idea what I was doing.
It was a real studio. A producer in a booth giving direction through headphones. A microphone that cost more than my car. And at the end of it, they handed me fifty bucks and I drove home thinking: that was the coolest experience I’ve ever had in my professional life.
And then I didn’t do another voice over for a decade.
A Producer Changed Everything
I’d been in radio since 1996. Read copy, hosted shows, done all the things you do when you live in that world. Voice over was something I knew existed in the same general zip code as what I did every day, but I never took it seriously as something that was actually for me.
Then a salesperson at the station just set up a session. Not a “hey you should think about this someday” conversation. An actual session, at an actual studio. The kind of thing that only happens when someone who believes in you does something about it before you talk yourself out of it.
I walked into a real commercial production studio, a proper setup with a producer in a separate booth and recorded something. I don’t even remember what the spot was for. I remember the producer’s voice in my headphones. I remember the feeling of the take clicking. I remember fifty dollars and a drive home that felt different from every other drive home I’d ever taken from work.
Imposter syndrome is a strange thing. It doesn’t show up with arguments. It just quietly makes you unavailable. For ten years, I was “available” for everything else and somehow never quite available for the thing that had felt like the coolest experience of my life.
The Decade I Almost Talked Myself Out Of
I don’t say this to be dramatic, it’s just what happened. I kept doing radio. I kept being good at the thing I was already doing. Voice over stayed in the category of “someday” for about ten years, which is one of the more efficient ways to let a good thing pass you by.
Eventually I found a college course. The instructor’s name was Trish, and she opened the first class with the dream version of the voice over life: roll out of bed at 9am, make some coffee, ease into your day, work in your pajamas, record from home, live like a human being. That’s what this career could look like, she said.
I took the class. I committed to it. And I am still getting up at 5:45am.
The dream Trish described is real…I just happen to be the version of it who sets an alarm. But the rest of it? Recording from home, doing work I actually care about, building something that’s mine? That part landed exactly the way she said it would. I just came into it with the 1996 radio version of my internal clock still running the show.
The VO industry has real standards and resources if you’re trying to understand what this career actually looks like. The GVAA Rate Guide is the closest thing to an industry standard for rates, and the Voice Acting Alliance is a solid community resource if you’re just starting to figure out the landscape.
A Booth on Craigslist and a Road Trip to Nashville
Here is the thing about building a home studio: you can spend a lot of money on it, or you can get creative.
I got a little creative.
A Whisper Room is a professional-grade isolation booth…the kind of thing that goes in radio stations and recording studios. They run about $6,000 new. I found one on Craigslist for a thousand dollars through a specific Google search hack I’d learned. It was near Nashville. My buddy Matt checked it out. And then the two of us drove a U-Haul down to Tennessee, loaded it up, and drove it back after what I will diplomatically describe as an amazing weekend full of debauchery and a really hard drive home.
That booth is now in my basement. I record in it every day.
What I Know Now
Thirty years into working with a microphone in front of my face, ten of them in voice over specifically, I know a few things.
I know that the fifty dollar session Dave set up was the most important professional thing that happened to me in my twenties, and I almost let it be a footnote. I know that the decade I spent “thinking about it” wasn’t wasted exactly, but it wasn’t nothing either. I know that the Whisper Room in my basement is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and that my friend Matt deserves a lot of the credit for showing up to help make it happen.
And I know that if you’re in radio right now, or if you took one VO class five years ago and haven’t done anything since, or if someone set up a session for you once and you thought it was the coolest thing, you might be in the decade I was in. I’m not here to push you. But I am here, and I know what that road looks like.
If you want to hear what thirty years of microphone work sounds like when it’s pointed in the right direction, the commercial demos are a good place to start. And if you want to know more about what I do and who I do it for, the about page has the fuller version of this story.
The booth is in the basement. The alarm goes off at 5:45. I’m still here.
Want to work together? Get in touch.
