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5 Tips to Improve Your Voice Acting Abilities

Paul

Paul

8 November 2021

5 Tips to Improve Your Voice Acting Abilities - Voquent

Voice acting is everywhere – games, cartoons, commercials, and beyond – but amazing voice actors have to train their vocal traits to improve.

How can you improve your voice acting skills?

These tips will help ensure your traits improve over time. Following these basic steps can help enhance your skills and improve your range.

Here are our recommendations:

 

Know all about the character

Understanding your character doesn’t just apply to voice over roles.

Whether you are narrating a story or performing a commercial, you need to comprehend what you are doing. By knowing what you must embody and training your vocal characteristics, you can specialise in your craft.

There are various techniques available that can help you improve your skills between jobs. All successful voice actors use this approach.

A principle we love is: “Knowing your character means being able to provide the needed elements and details to make the result more realistic and fitting. It’s similar to conducting research for writing, a project, or any other task.” This is the first, most important, and most beneficial tip for voice actors.

 

Always warm up

When you wake up in the morning, you don’t always have a beautiful voice – a professional voice actor likely knows this.

You need to use breathing warm-ups and prepare your vocal cords for the task. Voice acting requires this more than singing or anything else; hence, you can understand how important it is. The last thing you want to do is strain your voice – they are your tools of the trade.

A voice coach will tell you the same thing. There is a wide assortment of vocal warm-ups that someone can do to enhance their abilities and prepare for a job. From the most famous voice actor to a novice performer, learning the right warm-up exercises is essential.

 

Immerse yourself in the role

Voice acting requires more of you, emotionally, to immerse yourself into the character.

Using facial expressions while recording audio is likely to follow – because the voice part of voice acting is secondary to the acting part.

A voice actor is an actor – period. Limiting yourself will not help the performance; many projects will see a voice actor in motion capture settings, which amplify the degree to which a performer may be immersed in the scene.

Thinking about who you will be playing and their motivations are is essential to mastering your immersion in the role and massively augmenting your acting in the job.

You need to know all about the character, and even the most minor thing can help. You are becoming that character; hence you must know how and what to say in which tone and flavour.

 

Take classes

Voice acting is just half of the story here – you are also an actor. As such, acting classes are crucial.

You will learn about voice exercises, get voice acting tips and learn new ways to become better. This is a big part of the industry, and there is a wide range of options you can use.

Working on and recording audio regularly are related things that can help boost your skill. There are all kinds of perks acting classes offer, and all of these are going to work perfectly.

This helps more than you may believe and has a huge, positive effect on the result.

 

Take the time to practice

Yes, practising is mandatory and highly essential in this profession.

This step has been alluded to throughout this article, but it’s at the core of getting better at anything-  voice acting included. Regardless of the performance you are working toward; you can be a better candidate for the newest animation, video game, or movie by speaking through characters and honing your abilities.

Practice is not easy, but it does make perfect.

Reaching your goals will take a great deal of work, so chipping away at it each day is vital. This can include training your voice, reading, and learning more about the industry to enhance yourself as a voice actor. Learn, develop, and understand the trade, and you will be picking up jobs in no time.

It’s also worth brushing up on more technical aspects of contemporary voice acting. As the popularity of home studios is higher than ever, you may wish to learn about audio equipment. You can even make and use a home studio for these purposes, further enhancing your capacity to trial professional studio etiquette.

Practice a little bit every day, and it will be part of your routine before you know it.

 

Conclusion

As you can see, these tips are all simple, easy and very rewarding.

The main thing you must remember is never to quit. Professional voice actors didn’t just roll out of bed and start talking – it takes time to become one of the best voice actors in video games.

All of these require a lot of effort and patience, so you must have these down before you start working. You will have to make the time for these, and you will have to take baby steps.

Always remember that being bad at something is the first step to being good at it!

 

Become a Professional Voice Actor 

Paul

By Paul

Paul is our technical director and oversees all things technical at Voquent - he mainly writes about the technical processes behind the Voquent platform to give an insight into our reach and scale.

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