Hello and welcome the About Jin page. I'm Jin, and I live in Japan. But don't let the name and place of residence fool you, English is my mother tongue. I was born in New York, USA to a Jamaican immigrant family and raised in Georgia. And yet, I sound like none of those places, so you could say my English is very "US neutral".

I studied (Creative) Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University, and during that time I also studied abroad in Nagoya, Japan. After graduating, I returned to Japan to teach English. Did that for seven years, during which I learned my voice is one people actually like to listen to.

It would be a few more years of bouncing between "normal" corporate and part time jobs before I realized that, instead of trying (and failing) time and time again to conform to societal expectations, why not try working in a field I'm actually passionate about? Why not combine my love of writing and creating art with my (reportedly) easy to listen to voice? And here we are.

(As for my name, I changed my legal name when I married my Japanese partner. Having a legally-recognized Japanese name has made some things much simpler locally. On the other hand, I've been learning recently that international payment platforms seem to hate that.)

As a renter, I've had to get... creative with my room proofing. Since I don't want to damage the walls, I've opted for sticking sound dampening panels to collapsible room partitions. That cordons my desk off from the rest of the world. Then on my desk I have what I affectionately call the "Box of Shame". It's an 80cm x 80cm x 80cm cube of sound dampening foam with two open sides so I can lower it over my mic and monitor at my desk and complete this very simple, renter-friendly room treatment. I'd like to set up a dedicated studio one day, should I ever have a house I can do that in.

For my mic setup, I use a Samson Q2U run through a fifine Amplitank SG1. When I'm recording for YouTube videos I use FL Studio as my DAW (makes managing and editing the voice, music, and sfx tracks all in one place a breeze), but for simpler vocal-only recording (like audiobooks) I use Audacity.

Since I'm still fairly new to video editing, I'm open to suggestions for video editors. For now, I'm using Shotcut since I used that to make a promotion video for a company I once worked for so it's somewhat familiar.