Recording While You're Away

Just because you're on vacation, it doesn't mean you can't record an audition or a voiceover project for your client. My wife and I are road-trippers and I am armed and ready at all times! I have an Apogee mic, headphones and an iPad in the front seat for when an urgent project comes in.

Recently, I recorded an eLearning narration project outside of Kanab, Utah. Unfortunately, the hotel is a little too noisy, so I drove out a ways to a scenic overlook and recorded from the car! The acoustics from a vehicle can be very good! I prefer to record in a car rather than deal with noise in and around a hotel room. Plus, the room is usually large with tall ceilings and stucco walls. Not ideal for recording.

I stopped the car in the overlook parking lot and made sure I was parked far enough away from tourists, so I wouldn't have to deal with noise. It was a quiet spot with very little traffic passing by. Occasionally, I had to stop for a large truck passing by, but it was pretty peaceful overall. I had the gorgeous mountains in front of me and script in hand!

I began to record using the twisted wave app on my iPad, which in my opinion, is the best recording app money can buy! Very user-friendly and easy to edit any mistake or breath. Now, the audio isn't as clean as it would have been had I recorded this assignment from my home studio but the client was pinched for time and it was an eLearning script. Therefore, the audio would get compressed when they loaded it into their software program, so I wasn't worried about having award-winning audio.

If this is were a broadcast job for radio or television, it would have been a little more challenging to make it work. That said, I have booked several commercials from auditions I have recorded from the car. My agent always informs the client that the audition was being recorded from a vehicle and if I booked it, I would record it from my home studio. I've never run into any issues with a client complaining about the audio as long as they were informed that I was on a road trip and this was the best I could do at the moment.

Now, there will be plenty of times when you may want to turn your mic off during a vacation. While you never want to miss an opportunity, it's essential to give your voice and brain some rest once in a while!