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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
Will I be paid appropriately? If yes, then yes.
Why not? You’d make a perfect extra
Yeah, that’s the spirit! Now where to begin? 🤔
By the microphone.
🤔
No joke, a decent microphone / audio interface will make you sound much better.
Have you seen the VA opportunities for “Additional Voices” in the credits? Many people make a living in that non-marquee space and it has huge demand. The one trick is to learn how to emote or learn to sing. Simply sounding generic does no one any good if the voice is flat and unemotive. A voice has to convey emotion - how it sounds doing it will define how much work you get.
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
Generic like most main characters in anime? Why not?
I guess? Generic was all the criticism i received, haha.
Just keep going, if it bothers you, work in some effort into being able to make different voices, but sometimes it’s good to just have a generic voice. Fry from Futurama is just the VA’s regular voice, for example.
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.
Everyone hates hearing their own voice because it sounds different. Everyone whose work involves them being recorded says you’ll get used to it.
That’s where I am, too! Hate hearing my voice in recordings, it’s even worse if there’s an echo over voice calls.
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.”
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.
Thanks.
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. For so many reasons.
I do not and have never wanted to be a performer.
Voice acting seems ripe to disappear as an industry thanks to AI crap.
If it doesn’t disappear due to AI, it seems like most jobs would be low-pay, no benefits gig work.
The few talented folks who break through gig work into real paying careers are going to be the ones who aren’t being described as “generic”.
I already have a stable career. And while I’m not looking for a side gig, if I were, voice acting wouldn’t be it for the reasons above.
Those are all my reasons though. It’s obviously a viable job for some people (or just a hobby).
Yeah, that’s some good input. I am playing Valorant, and someone asked if I was a VA. When questioned they said i have a generic sounding voice.
If the idea tickles your fancy and you want to look into voice work more, please consider checking out LibriVox. It’s a website with tons of open domain audiobooks voiced by volunteers. Their volunteer section has a lot of good info.
I don’t volunteer to read, but I greatly appreciate the work they do. They don’t accept donations anymore, but request people route to the Internet Archive. All green flags in my book.
Interesting, thank you.
My guess is they meant you sound like a “default character” voice (I feel like that sounds negative but I don’t mean it that way). Like if you were to be the narrator for a menu, a random character, the main character’s friend etc, your voice wouldn’t be distracting or feel out of place. Maybe the voice of an audiobook or online language course or something?
That could also be it, but it could have been a worse “compliment”. 😅
Yeah I dont think they were saying it to be rude, even if it came out a little odd
Depends on the gig, but yeah, probably.
Also, Morgan Freeman does make it sound nice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2BzLf2jwIM
Ever since I was a little boy, people have enjoyed the sound of my voice. And I figured you either get busy talking, or you get busy dying. The work is really quite easy. While even right now, I’m just sitting in a chair, sipping some tea, and reading from a script. The wall is covered with something that resembles egg crates except they’re soft and spongy like a Twinkie. Like a Twinkie.
No… Who wants to hire a VA with a generic voice?
I mean, besides Anime dubbers?
I once heard a lady respond to a claim that she should be doing voice acting. Basically she’s a show host and presenter, so she should know fairly much about the field and is already pretty trained for voice stuff.
And basically, she said that she couldn’t do that (I assume professionally), because you essentially need voice training which takes 1-2 years. Presumably that’s not a full-time training, and rather just regular feedback from a trainer + you training in your own time, but yeah, still sounds rather involved.
I’m guessing, though, there’s also a big difference between voice acting for a series, where you need to speak longer sentences correctly in the right tempo with appropriate emotion,
and just one-off gigs like a radio ad for a local company.It would have to pay more than my current job.
I mean a lot of voice actors get gigs just doing weird sounds
Why not? Norm Macdonald had a career in show business and he had the blandest monotone voice ever. People tell me I sound just like him
That dude had a very recognizable voice.
I’ve voice acted for some fan material and many people wish it sounded more generic, though nobody has complained that it was technically bad.
Hmm, might try to give it a whirl online.
