How to Improve Your Voice Acting Skills
Published 7th January, 2022
Image Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/ZDNyhmgkZlQ
If practice makes perfect, then what can you, as a voice actor, do to improve your skills and get an edge over the competition? As it turns out, there’s a lot you can do to hone your skills. Voice acting, after all, is still acting. And even if you don’t use your facial expressions to emote, you can certainly work on training and improving your voice and vocal cords.
In fact, since it's your voice that carries all the undertones and nuances that reveal the inner conflicts and hidden motives of the character, you’ll need to give it as much practice as possible. That’s not as difficult as it sounds. For the most part, you’ll enjoy having more control over your voice.
Breathing and Accents
Throughout your voice acting career and depending on the roles you play, you might have to empower your character with a different accent to increase its credibility. The ability to get a certain accent right doesn’t come naturally to everyone. But that’s a skill that voice actors are known to master.
The need to learn different accents becomes more paramount if you yourself have a unique accent that is easy to distinguish. If, say, you have a thick Texan accent, then playing a sleek New York stockbroker might prove to be challenging. Unless you learn to lose your accent first and speak in a generic voice. From then on, you can broaden your voice skills by learning new accents and adding them to your arsenal.
The way you breathe and how you control your breathing can also have an impact on your voice. This is more obvious in your telephone voice. When you listen to a telephone voice over, you can tell right away that the speaker has a good command over the airflow out of their lungs and through their vocal cords. Breathing from the diaphragm allows you to have a strong voice and reduce the need to breathe repeatedly, especially while delivering a long winding speech or a lot of complicated lines.
To strengthen your diaphragm and increase both the depth of your breathing and the range of your voice, lie on your back and put a couple of heavy books on your stomach. Breathe in deeply as you try to lift up your belly with the heavy tomes. Breathe out, bringing your belly down. Repeat this exercise for 10 minutes every day for up to 4 weeks. By the end of this training, your breathing will become deeper and your voice stronger.
Acting and Overacting
Acting is part of your job. It’s right there in the name. Although you’re encouraged to build your career on strong foundations through acting classes, the acting part doesn’t end when the classes are over. When you get a new role to play, try to immerse yourself in the character. Understand their motives, background, and conflicts. And when you have fleshed them out, give them a distinct voice. Although listeners will only get that last part, the rest of the character will blend in the voice and give it authenticity and credibility.
Acting also involves paying attention to the voice of characters in movies, cartoons, and TV shows, then trying to mimic them. You’re not mimicking the voices to make fun of them, but to replicate their voice range, inflection, and pitch. This is a great practice for your vocal cords, breathing, and acting skills as well. Record yourself while doing these voices in your home recording studio and see how close you got. You can also use software to compare your performance with the original voices, and find out which tones you managed to capture and which escaped you.
If acting is part of your training as a voice actor, then overacting is the other side of the equation. Unlike in acting schools, overacting is not only desirable for your voice acting skills but necessary as well. The idea behind overacting is to take any emotion to the highest possible level. Don’t be afraid to sound grotesque or to go overboard. Credibility is not a prerequisite when you’re practicing overacting. A user manual is ideal, since emotions are not involved when reading it aloud. But you’ll choose an emotion and take it to the extreme while you perform your user manual.
Overacting will help you explore the depths and ranges of emotions you have. It will also give your voice a good exercise. After each overacting practice, spend some time with some regular acting exercises to counter the negative impact overacting can have on your acting style. If you find that overacting is taking a toll on your skills, take a break from it and focus instead on learning accents, mimicking other voices and actors, and practicing diaphragm breathing.
As a voice actor, you need to stay sharp and increase your arsenal of accents, voice ranges, and a wide array of emotions that you can express with your voice alone. With practice, you’ll get better. Starting with diaphragm breathing, you move on to voice mimicking, mastering different accents, and finally exploring the depth of your emotions with overacting.