By Blair Hardman
Owner/engineer at Zone Recording Studio
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- This is not about getting an agent or a making a VO demo or marketing yourself. This is about you.
- Well you need a mouth. You should have good control of it and it shouldn’t make any unnecessary noises like lip flaps, lisps, pops and whistles.
- You need an ear. And the ear should enjoy listening to other voices. A musical ear helps because all sentences have a melody and different melodies and inflections convey different meanings.
- You need lungs. Big lungs that take deep quiet diaphramatical breaths. Because when amateurs read scripts, they often take lots of little unnatural breaths.
- You need a heart. Emotion is what makes a voiceover believable. It’s what moves people to give to a charity or motivates them to buy a new car.
- You need arms. When you speak from the heart, your whole body is engaged. You gesture, and the moving of your arms affects the sound of your voice.
- You need a mental soldering gun to rewire yourself. When we read, our eyes take in the words, they go to the brain, and straight out the mouth, bypassing the gut, the heart and the body. You need to learn to read the words, send them down through the body and back up to the mouth.
- You need rhythm. Many people speed up and slow down when they read, or have little unnatural surges.
- You need a life. Have you noticed how most teenagers end sentences on an up inflection, like a question? Is it because they don’t know the answers to life’s questions yet? Listen to someone who’s been through life changing experiences and can you hear it. Your life changes your voice. It gives it depth, and variety.
- You need to forget elementary school. Reading aloud in front of a class was, for most people, a very tense situation. We developed stilted mannerisms; sing song inflections or monotone pitches, because we were so nervous.
- You need an education, especially for narration and technical reads. You never know what subject you will be asked to speak about with authority.
- I recently did a 30,000 word narration for Medtronic, the people who make the little tubes for your arteries. Medicine is a hobby of mine so words like neointimal hyperplasia, and myocardial infarction came easily.
- You need to be an actor. But the challenges are different from being a stage actor because you can’t memorize your lines, nobody can see you, and you have to stand in one place.
- You need to have a screw loose. Especially for character voices. You may need to come up with the voice of a Dr. Scholl’s shoe insert or a glass of milk or a water skiing possum.
- You need stamina. Especially for audiobooks. I am expected to read 3 to 4 hours a day and sound the same at the end of the day as I did at the beginning.
You need lessons. And lots of practice. On a microphone. Learning voiceacting is like learning to play a musical instrument. And there are about as many fully employed voiceactors as there are football players in the NFL.- You need to not say “I’m Sorry” when you make a mistake during a recording. It takes you out of character. Recording at Zone Recording Studio means never having to say you’re sorry.
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. . . to remind us of the value of silence and the importance of spaces between words. - The one thing you don’t need to be a voiceactor is a great big voicey voice. Many scripts these days ask for a strong confident voice, but not “announcery”. This is the age of the “natural” voice. So now we can all get into the exciting fast paced world of voiceover.