I’m an actor- mostly theatre. I’ve VO’d a handful of TV commercials. I am not a successful voice actor. It requires as much dedication, training, equipment etc as any career.
I would recommend two things.
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voice classes and books in the tradition of Cecily Berry. You’ll also want to look into some phonetics/IPA work as well. People will expect you to know - for e.g. how and why a southern accent diphthongizes the vowels and which vowels it shares with GenAm vs RP.
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music / sound production. You may be expected to do your own noise removal, normalization, amplificiation and limiting.
Awesome! The more information the better! Thank you!
not to dox you, but if you gave me your nearest major metropolitan area I’d be happy to look up which voice classes seem like they could be legit as a starting point.
Not OP but can you look at St. Louis, Missouri?
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I’ve been told a lot that I have a great voice and that I should be in the radio many times as an adult. I’ve never actually considered it because I hate hearing the sound of my own voice, and I assume people are just being nice.
The “I hate the sound of my voice” refrain is the most annoying shit I hear and honestly think most people who vocalize that thought are just acting out their own internalized script of how to not appear self-centered (while actually being incredibly self-centered). Your voice sounds the exact same to everyone else coming out of your fish-hole as it does coming out a speaker.
Edit: I’m not saying that your perceived own voice doesn’t sound different to you when speaking versus when played back initially but after years of doing recorded voice work I can say—you get used to it pretty quickly and the differences kinda blend away into a wash of “that is how I sound.” That is why I find that common refrain to be annoying.
Anyway, no one listening to a recording of you thinks “oh they sound weird.”
But it doesn’t sound the same to the speaker. The speakers skull vibrates with the speech and makes the pitch lower and richer in their ears.
If you are not used to your voice being played from a speaker it always sounds more chipmunk then you are used to.
No, some of us really hate the sound of our voices, and yes the voice sounds the same to others as in speakers, but not the same I hear it when I’m talking, the reason is that when you’re talking you hear the vibration in your skull, so hearing your voice as it sounds to others is strange, and some of us dislike that compared to how we hear ourselves and don’t understand how people can tolerate us talking.
Yeah, supposedly I’d be great on radio (heard that all the time when I worked customer service and had to get on the PA several times per day), but my voice as heard by others makes me want to bash my own skull in.
Generic voices are a necessity too. They provide contrast to good voices and are great at adding without taking away from a point or scene. I.E. generic guy says “commander we have a problem” Commander then gets to say his cool line with awesome tone. Or generic background talk that you don’t want people to focus on. Like people chatting in a restaurant you want to be homogeneous so that Morgan Freeman’s voice is what you focus on.
Plenty of good reasons to want basic voice actors, though most anyone can also fill that roll, so probably hard to be a professional generic voice lol
