The 5 Best Voiceover Tips for Beginners

By Chris Tester - British Male Voiceover

Since first embarking on my voice-over journey, I've learned quite a few profound lessons about what not to do that you shouldn't waste time. Arguing with people on Facebook groups about which microphone they like that the voice-over rail might not necessarily be the most reputable platform out there and that German dubbing porn might not necessarily be that good for your reputation in general, but apart from these profound takeaways, what other tips might I give myself?

The decision can be debilitating when starting any new career. There can be so much new information out there. It's difficult to know where to begin or what to prioritize, and I know that I definitely wasted a lot of time going along dead ends or making very obvious mistakes that really wasted a lot of time, money, and energy as a result. And I grant that failure is definitely an essential part of the process.

Let’s dig in!

Five Key Lessons for Beginners

As I've already covered in this video here, there are five key lessons that I would definitely go back in time and tell myself if I could when starting out and so in the absence of having a time machine. I'm going to tell you them instead!

Tip #1:

My first tip is a pretty essential performance-related one, and that is always to make sure that you're talking to one specific person regardless of what type of voice-over project you're actually working on. If you make your voice-over delivery specific and rooted in one person's reaction. Then it's going to make it more personal and go alongside that as well. I would say practicing doing voice over with a smile and seeing how that warm quality basically goes from the outside in can be essential in being able to establish a real connection with the listener as with any form of acting, really being specific in who your audience member is and what they want and what kind of um reaction that you want to get from them is incredibly crucial and something that I wish I prioritized more rather than sounding good at the beginning of my career.

Tip #2:

My second tip is also performance-related, and that would always be worked out what the subtext is. So, a car commercial is never really about the car that you're selling. It's about the lifestyle you'll want to portray that gives access to the person who wants to buy it. Go on an adventure of a lifetime on the road to discovery. The same would go if you're working for an explainer video. You're not just imparting information, but it's because you want to make a difference to the person who's listening in terms of their lives, what do they need to know, and why and again, understanding the importance of the subtext; running underneath why? What you're saying is important in the first place is really crucial in terms of giving the best voice-over that you can.

Tip #3:

My third tip would be to work from a place of relaxation, and this really comes down to the fact that when we're starting out especially, we want to get things right, and when we want to get things right in a career, that prizes speech. Generally, we want to speak very clearly, and in a career that focuses on the spoken word, that usually results in us speaking very clearly and sometimes over-enunciating, and I certainly found that coming from stage work where I did a lot of articulation exercises, so there were a lot of plosives going on and everything like that meant.

As a result, I sounded quite ready when I started out because I was pronouncing every single word, which is not what we do in real life and in speech, of course. The other thing coming from a trained actor that's been drummed into me for years is that your best performance comes from a state of relaxation. You have to be prepared. Still, then you need to let everything go and that I think is really the crucial aspect. Do your warm-ups work on technical aspects that you personally need to address but then when it actually comes to stepping up to the performance. You need to try and come from a process of relaxation. So, again focusing on the message, the connection, and the audience is not on your physical your technical execution.

Tip #4:

My fourth tip is a pretty inevitable one which is don't record your demos too soon. I know I certainly did, and I would say probably the first three commercial demos that I recorded in the early-mid-2000s were absolute and utter trash, while most voice actors are a bit more streetwise in doing their due diligence with demo producers. Now it's still something to be mindful of. You really need to focus on your coaching and your mastery of a particular genre first before you go and actually pay the money for a demo because otherwise, you'll be like me, someone who has to constantly re-record their demos because they're not good enough and you can't really salvage much from them.

You need to have a clear understanding of the genre in question. You need to know where your voice fits within that genre, and you need to know the extremes what is your range within that genre, not so that you display range for range's sake but so that you can set very clear parameters about what reads are going to serve you best as marketing too.

Tip #5:

My final tip would be you can do it yourself. When I started out on my voice acting career, I came very much from an actor's perspective that there were certain gatekeepers, i.e., agents and casting directors, that I needed to get on board with in order to properly make progress and to a certain extent that is true but as well as cultivating those very important relationships. There are many other ways that you can actually source voice-over work, and you don't even need to have a demo in order to be able to do that.

Now with things like Fiverr and freelancing websites, there's a way of being able to cultivate and monetize voice-over work from an early stage and actually build yourself up, or alternatively, you can go through the whole pay-to-play route and also, of course, most crucially you can use direct marketing to really create one-to-one relationships with clients that nobody else owns in terms of the relationships. So, they're yours, and it's a relationship that you can build progressively.

Final Thoughts

As a result, obviously, there's a laundry list of different things that I wish I could tell my former self when starting, but these were the five that I think would have probably made the biggest and quickest difference in getting my voice-over career up and running. I hope you've enjoyed this video and found it useful. If so, please do like, subscribe, please do comment below if there was something specific that you found particularly useful when starting out or that you wish. You had a time machine to tell yourself when you were starting out in the first place. Thank you for watching so much as ever, and I look forward to seeing you next time!