Professional voiceover artist, Larry Simon gave a talk on voice technique for the Chicago Area Podcasters Network at the Apple Store on November 7, 2006. Here’s some of my notes that I jotted down:
Imagine your voice as an instrument.
Pick a persona that fits your voice and stick with it.
Stand centered. Imagine your self grounded. Solid grounded on the ground. Feel the ground.
Pre-recording practices:
–Act like someone else so you get you get out of yourself and it expands your range.
–Nasal Check: Put your finger on one side of your nose and talk. If you feel vibration, then you are talking too nasaly. Focus on breathing to cure this problem.
–No peanut butter. No milk. Those are snot-producers. Snot bad.
–Apples are great to solve dry mouth, so is tea and warm water.
–Quickly count from one to ten, start with “one” being very loud and go down quietly to ten. Then repeat quickly this sequence quickly three times.
Keep straight posture. You want to breath out of your diaphram, and that’s like in your stomach. If your shoulders are slouched, you won’t be able to breath as well, and you’ll end up talking out of your throat or nose.
Interviewing:
–Don’t talk too much (it’s much harder to edit out hours of talk)
–Let them talk, you want them to talk much more than you.
–Lead them to an answer not only with your questions, but your body language. It’s helpful to overemphasize things like tipping your head forward to imply a response.
He talked about much more at the event, and his tips really come alive MUCH more than the type on this page. He’s such a great animated guy overflowing with wonderful advice. I would really recommend him for any of your voiceover and narration needs.
re: these tips ‘snot bad!
did he make you count to three and before you knew it, you were standing on a chair clucking like a chicken?
Apples do indeed solve the dry-mouth problem: I’m drooling over a new MacBook Pro.
Did he just tell us to eat apples? All I got from that was, don’t drink milk and when interviewing you want the person you’re interviewing to talk and answer questions…..