Voice Acting Advice: Do's and Don'ts

Welcome to the Do’s and Don’ts of the voice acting world! In this post, I’ll lay down all the basic (and less obvious) rules of Voice acting.

Do:

Make sure to warm up before every recording session. It’s not just your voice to need to warm up ether, you should try to relax and stretch your neck and shoulders too! Your voice will always sound better after stretching and believe me, it is a big leap in the right direction.

Don’t:

Clear your throat by coughing. Coughing can damage your vocal cords and doing it while trying to get the gunk out is unnecessary. Try a light or low hum to clear the throat, and a slow breathing exercise to clear the lungs.

Do:

Self-Promote. It’s important to try and post a self-advertisement wherever you can, as long as its not spam and provides information to the reader. “I’m free so order my gig’ isn’t going to get you clicks, but ‘If anyone needs help with voice acting jobs, or maybe a reference to a good voice actor let me know. My gig is ___. ‘ Will sound like you genuinely care and get more people to click on your link.

Don’t:

Spam websites. If you post something online, make sure you put quality into the post. Create a story and post your link at the end. If you don’t put any effort into your post, no one will click and buy your gig, and the post itself will make you look bad.

Do:

Listen to podcasts and follow up on webpages about coaching. Coaching might be a long stride away from where you are in your voice over career, but it's important to absorb as much information about voice acting as possible. Even if you have a nice voice, can you use it properly? Are their ranges you can reach that you haven’t discovered yet? Probably. Learning more about how to voice act and couching is an important part of the behind the scenes. Your quality will improve naturally after getting through a few courses.

Don’t:

Have a long period of time between sessions. Try to do a session a day to keep ‘fit’, or three a week at least.

Do:

Try to step outside your comfort zone. Trying new voices and positions is an important way to grow as a voice actor. Over the course of your career, you’ll have to reach outside the area you’re used to get more parts, so practice weird or fun voices, and experiment with the voices you have already.

Don’t:

Mess up your throat. While you experiment, make sure you stretch your cords before hand, and don’t try a voice if its completely outside your range. This can damage your voice and vocal cords and leave you with a nasty sore throat.

Do:

Take care of your voice. Drink tea that coats or is men for throat health. Drink 8 cups of water. Get a good night’s sleep. And exercise your throat every day by humming and breathing exercises.

Don’t:

Over exert your voice. If your throat feels bad after a 3-hour recording session, try to only do two hours of recording and take a break. Never go for extended sessions unless you KNOW you can use voices you are used to and never use difficult voices at the start of a session. If you use a difficult voice first, you could end up straining the muscles in your throat. Start with easy voices to warm up and move on to the more difficult ones afterward.

Do:

Record around the same time every day. What most people don’t know, is that your voice changes over the course of the day. Depending on the time of day, how you’ve spent the day, how relaxed or stressed you are. All of this impacts our voice and changes it. To keep a similar voice for long projects like audiobooks and narrations, always record around the same time of day, and if you can, try to keep your interactions and stress levels around the same as well. If I want to record at night, I always take a shower to relax my body, then I record around 7 or 8 so I’m not likely to stay up too late recording. If I want to record in the morning, I wake up with a cold splash of water to my face and neck and record early around 6:30-7.

Don’t:

Repeatedly put off recording because is seems challenging. If you are delivered 16 pages of solid script, try not to feel intimidated. Scripts are always shorter then they seem. A person on average speaks 900 words in five minutes. So most scripts of 4000 words (usually about 16 pages) take just over twenty minutes to read. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed by long scripts, so if you feel like its a lot of work, try breaking it up. Break the script into paragraphs and read each paragraph while taking a short gulp or two of water and performing a breathing exercise. This will help you mentally tackle bigger jobs and help stop the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Do:

Try to record when it is quiet on your street. The noise from outside your window can end up ruining your recording. If you choose to record on garbage day, you could end up with, well, trash. Make sure to pick times went everyone has ether settled down at home for the night or is already at work. This way you can get all of your recordings done uninterrupted.

Don’t:

Record somewhere with an echo. If nowhere in your house is suitable for recording, consider ether renting a studio or making a makeshift ‘tent’. These tents should be like the pillow forts you made as a kid, but now, we’re using them to block outside noise. Try to record and set up a tent like this in a closet, as they are the most sound absorbing rooms in a house.

Do:

Edit your breaths out of your recordings. This can influence the entire quality of a project, and clients love having a skilled editor give them a good quality project back. One of the most simple changes (other than getting rid of background noise) and most effective is to simply listen for breaths and cut them out. It seems like a minor deal, but people want to hear you speak clearly and this is one of the single best ways to improve your quality of editing.

Don’t:

Work in a messy space. Working in a cluttered or messy space starts to take a toll over time. Having a cluttered workspace has been shown to slow down progress and whittle down motivation. Having a clearer workspace keeps people motivated and ready to record.

Do:

Read your scripts out loud multiple times before recording. Practice making perfect. The more times you read a script the more you understand it. Try giving each take a new voice or putting a new emphasis on a new word in each sentence. Once you figure out how you want to say each sentence, record yourself saying it three times with slight variations. Once you get to the editing portion, you can choose the cream of the crop options to help you nail auditions.

Don’t:

Forget the four main questions of voice acting. These are questions you need to answer before every recording. Who am I talking to? Why are we having this conversation? What voice am I using? What can I add to this story? These four questions MUST be answered before you hit the record button and you have to remember these as your motivation for recording during your performance! Practice this as much as you can, and it will be rewarding!

Do:

Keep yourself clean and maintain personal hygiene. In order to keep motivated, its important to keep on top of personal hygiene. Similar to clean spades, feeling clean and refreshed has been shown to improve productivity and the quality of one’s work. So brush those teeth and don’t forget to floss!

Don’t:

Get distracted by notifications. If you can, leave your phone outside your range of sight, and turn notifications off temporarily while recording. If it’s possible, turn your recording device on airplane mode to keep away from all internet distractions while recording.

Do:

Keep up to date with voice acting podcasts. Most freelancing sites have their own podcast with tips and tricks. The best way to succeed at their site is to listen to their tricks on how to do it! With sites like voices, you’ll also get access to podcasts about voice acting and self couching. Listening to podcasts on Spotify and iTunes could also help you zone your skills and take you to the next level!

Don’t:

Forget to self-promote regularly. Take five to ten minutes every day to post on social media and Facebook groups to extend your reach outside of just freelancing websites. Make it a routine to do it right before bed or right after you wake up. I do it on my lunch break at my job, and I know another voice actor that does it right before they shower every day. Find a time that works for you and make sure to update social media every day!

Do:

Turn in ALL your work on time or early. Turning in work late is the fastest way to get people to lose confidence

in you, your brand, and your gigs. This is the fasted and easiest way to get a bad review and tank your rating. If you have a problem turning work in, add more days to your delivery time. And if you end up turning the work in early, you could end up with a shining review!

Don’t:

Forget to have fun voice acting! This is the most important of all! Not only will having fun keep you interested in coming back to work, but its easy to tell a voice actor who is having fun from one who isn’t. The more positive energy you put into a project, the better!

And thats all folks! Thanks for sticking all the way through this journey, I hope you’ve learned a lot. I certainly did while researching for it! Let me know what you thought about all of these Do’s and Don’t series and if I missed anything! I’ll see you next month for more advice!

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