Ever hear of the jazz guitarist Joe Pass?
Check him out sometime if you want to hear a true virtuoso.
I love to listen to great musicians before I start my day. I’m humbled and inspired by their dedication and focus.
One the winning habits of great musicians is practice -they do it daily without fail or their work suffers.
The great classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz wrote: “If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”
Voice over is nowhere near as demanding but when you’re starting out, you really do need to devote some time to daily practice-even if its only 20 minutes a day done consistently.
But what’s the best way to practice voice over and how do you do it right?
That’s the topic of this week’s INSIDE VOICE OVER Video Training blog.
This week, we’re going to talk about how to practice your voice overs. You got to do it, especially when you’re starting out. But believe it or not, you don’t need to spend that much time practicing. If you can do it consistently for 15 to 20 minutes every day, you’re going to really make headway.
So the best way to practice your voice overs is against a model, using what I call the tape and ape method. And that means you’re going to take actual TV and radio commercials or spots off of YouTube and transcribe them, so you have the script and then you play the actor that booked the job, the narrator that’s doing it. And then you record yourself imitating that practice session or that recording. And the reason you do that is so you’re not practicing in a vacuum because you see, none of us can really be objective about the way we sound because we listened to our voice from inside our head.
So the best way to improve yourself when you’re alone working at home, is not just to read scripts, but try to copy what other successful voice talent are doing. Not to end up sounding like them, but to get a feeling internally about pacing and about copy interpretation.
Now another great thing to do for practicing is keep a record of it. So get a log and start writing down how often you’ve practiced every day. And after a few days, you can’t lie to yourself anymore. You will really see and you’ll push yourself to do it. And I guarantee if you can keep this up for about 21 days, that good practice habit is going to be embedded in your consciousness. So that’s what I got for you this week.
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
P.S. When you’re ready, the first step is my VO Start Here program including a professional voice consultation with our talent advisor and my Perfect Performance on-line training.
To get started, click here now
