Alone with our voices, or the dangers of self-direction

All our lives we’ve been told that we need to reinvent ourselves, that there’s always something new to learn, but those of us in the voice industry see the landscape transform daily. At least for me, it makes me think that everything I worked on last year (new demo, website, logo, photos, and all the things we do to stay relevant) has already worn out and needs to be done again. We have to change everything and constantly think about what we need to “unlearn.” It causes me great anxiety to think about unlearning, about what I no longer want to remember when I stand in front of a microphone, but simultaneously should do to return to basics. This remains fundamental for voice artists, and paradoxically, all that I’ve learned over more than 30 years – today I’m going to let it go and distance myself as much as possible from what I was doing at the microphone just a few years ago.

I found some audio recordings from 15 years ago where I listened to myself and said: “I have the same voice but it’s as if nobody (not even me) remembered that I used that style, I feel it’s trendy now and I had already forgotten about it.”

It’s as if a different voice actor lives inside me and has let herself be carried by the current, because nobody tells me how, because nobody tells me “no,” because we’ve been left alone with our voices.
Self-direction is a huge risk that voice actors face every day. And we don’t like being corrected or having changes made, but at the same time, we wish someone would direct us (for mercy’s sake!). Sometimes I feel like I’m in a huge assembly line, where if you zoom out you’d lose sight of me because this is immense. I feel like I record and record and record, and sometimes I even forget to keep track… and I forget to bill for it, and I run out of time, and I forget things, and ughhhh… The retakes, the little phrases, a video, a spot.

How are we going to survive this trance we’re living in? I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the projects; what I’m saying is that sometimes I get so caught up in so many things that suddenly it’s like entering a trance. It’s overwhelming, and although I think I’m in control, I’m not. There’s such eagerness to work on projects we like that sometimes we don’t even see them pass by – they just come and go in a breath.
These times are about delegating, asking for help, using tools, and stopping being the one who charges, who serves coffee, and who edits the audio.

How do you handle your day-to-day?

Vero López Treviño.