Welcome to the exciting world of voice acting! Whether you’re bringing characters to life, narrating audiobooks, or lending your voice to commercials, warming up your voice is crucial.
And trust me, it’s not as daunting as it sounds—in fact, it can be quite enjoyable! Below, I’ve compiled some top warm-up exercises for beginners, along with personal anecdotes to keep things relatable.
As someone who used to do professional VO work, this article could have been one sentence long: do theatrical vocal exercises.
That’s it. But that’s literally for beginners. Like the first few months before you ever try to get work on anything.
Then you can move on to reading copy. Find books, news articles, etc. Read them over and over every day. Get to the point that you can read them as flawlessly as possible on first sight. It takes a long time.
I also highly recommend this book by the late, great Daws Butler, the Hanna-Barbera equivalent of Mel Blanc: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1675428.Scenes_for_Actors_and_Voices
I practiced with scenes from that book pretty much every day.
You need a good demo. Something that wows people within the first 10 seconds and doesn’t make them listen to more than 60 seconds, because a lot of casting directors will stop after 10 and not want to continue after 60. They have shit to do.
Now, all of this said, it is a dying field. Even when I was doing it over 10 years ago, it was a very difficult market to break into in any large scale no matter how good you are- and not to toot my own horn, but I got endless responses of, “wow! Your demo is amazing! I really love the part where you ______! I wish I could use you for something. I’ll let you know.” AI is going to make this way worse for anyone not famous that they want VO from.
Some other things:
Don’t expect to get an agent for a long time, but do send your demo and headshot (they like a headshot for some stupid reason) to every agent you can possibly find. I’m not sure how to send demos these days. It was still CDs when I was doing it.
Be as proactive as possible: that means contacting every company that might use you VO work- ad agencies, educational services, anyone that has a marketing department, game companies obviously- but you’re more likely to get work from small ones, even one-person operations. I had a guy who did Facebook games by himself and I would do 20-30 seconds of VO work for him for $50. Low pay, sure, but he came back to me over and over again. Stuff like that adds up.
Don’t expect to get in any union ever. The number of VO actors in unions is minuscule. I was never able to get a SAG job even though I had a lot of steady work in L.A. and you can’t get into SAG unless you get cast in a SAG show. I did work for the aforementioned Hanna-Barbera myself a short time before WB killed them and it was non-union somehow. Don’t ask me how.
And after all of that- you probably won’t get rich doing this. You probably won’t even be able to do it full-time despite the massive amount of effort you put into it. Almost no one in VO is able to make a living at it and do nothing else. I went to school for audio engineering and built a small VO studio in L.A. for myself, but also rented it out to others and did things with it like sound editing. And I was not one of the wealthy people in L.A.
One last thing- get a good microphone, a good microphone stand and a good music stand to put scripts on (i.e. not the cheap ones that fold up). Which means an investment. And get a good place to record in. That means either turning a place in your home, such as a closet, into a vocal booth, building one or buying one. I’ve built by myself or had help building six of them now. It’s not fun, but it’s cheaper than buying a vocal booth.
That’s all the advice I can think of for now. Feel free to ask me anything.
Edit: One more thing, people always tell me what a great voice I have. Yeah, because I’ve put years of work into that. I actually had a terrible lisp when I was a kid. Like we’re talking cartoon character-level… but I took initiative at age 15 and went to the school’s speech therapist. I put work into that, and then I started to put work into my voice as a whole. I don’t think I got my first paid VO job until I was in my 20s and that was only because I was working at a recording studio that did radio commercials and they needed me very occasionally to read copy. I would say I didn’t get my first legitimate paid VO work until I was 25. It’s really hard to break into the business.