Did you play an instrument as a kid?
I took piano lessons from a teacher who smelled like stale cigarettes and poked my finger with a pencil every time I hit a wrong note– which was often. It’s a wonder I don’t have lead poisoning.
Practice was torture but I did learn to play The Monkees greatest hits and can still pound out “Daydream Believer” with the best of them.
If you’re learning voice over, and intend to do this for fun or money with any degree of skill, you must practice. And if you’re resisting doing so because of childhood musical trauma I get it.
But I promise that if you practice the way I show you in this week’s Inside Voice Over Video Training blog, your voice over practice sessions will be fun and entertaining.
In fact, you’ll actually look forward to doing it.
Now, you might resist practice. You might be a little traumatized like I was as a kid where your parents forced you to spend hours and hours practicing the piano while all your friends were outside playing, and you couldn’t do it. But voice over is different. I’m going to give you a fun way to practice voice over. It’s going to pay off big time. It’s a method I called tape and ape.
Here’s how this works. You go online. You turn on YouTube, and you record some commercials, or you can do this off of the television or radio. The then you transcribe the commercials and if you’re doing it on YouTube, you just turn on closed caption for the hearing impaired, and you’ll see the transcript of the voice over spot right there on your screen.
You’ve got your script now and you have the way that the professional voice artist, the person who was paid for it did it. You play it, and you copy that voiceover artist word by word, line by line. It doesn’t matter if they’re the opposite sex. It doesn’t matter if it’s a voice completely different than yours. You will learn a ton. Because remember, that other person got paid for doing the voice over job right? So, you might as well emulate them. So try this tape and ape for me for about a week, and then write to me. Let me know how it worked for you. I guarantee it’s going to really help you grow and learn voice over.
Watch this week’s short training video Here Now
After you watch the video be sure to leave a comment. I always love to hear from you so I can support you as you grow your voice over career.
To your voice over success,
Susan Berkley
Founder, The Great Voice Company
