How To Become Better At Radio Voice-Over Work

By Lauren Hulbert

In the current climate, every extra penny that you can bring into your household budget counts. Well, an obvious way of achieving this is to harness a new career. One such career, often overlooked - but surprisingly lucrative is radio voiceover work. In this article, I want to give you a simple, step-by-step plan to ensure that you have plenty of voiceover work coming your way.

The only way to improve a skill is to practice it. However, the way you practice will make a difference to the speed at which you improve. You don't have to spend a lot of money to start. Just talk to yourself in the mirror and get used to hearing your voice being made out loud. Talk into your voicemail system or use your office dictation machine to listen to yourself on playback. You can make great improvements in your voice-over skills using these very cheap techniques. Then consider investing in some better recording equipment. You could buy a computer microphone and use your computer's processors to help you improve your voice over talent. Another great way is to get into public speaking - as daunting as it might seem.

Most people want to vomit when they are asked to speak out aloud in front of a crowd. It can be highly daunting. But often, you will surprise yourself at how good you are and people are often vary gracious when listening to you. Join a toastmaster club in your local town to commit yourself to talking and getting objective feedback. Take the chance to make impromptu speeches at parties or office functions. It will be worth the effort.

The first step is to get started. Talk as often as you can. The next step is to improve your sound, your control and your range of speaking options. The better you are at this step, the more work that will come your way.

So, to improve your sound, you should start off just talking in your natural tone. Don't try too hard at the start. Listen back to your self on tape and try to work out what you could do to improve your tonality, your dicition and your pace. Controlling your breathing is the key skill.

You should also then try to vary your pace, but keep your diction good. Also change your tonality. Try to sound more gruff or smoother. Try to sound as if you come from a different part of the country. Mess around with intonations. Just try to vary your range of voiceover work and still maintain control.

Become one of the top 1% of voiceover artists in your area and you will find a lot of work coming your way. Simply work on your voice-over talent for 30 minutes every day for the next 3 months. By focussing on this skill consistently, you will develop the muscle needed to succeed. Just keep a notice what you do to create certain results and then improve because of every finding that you make. Before long, you will be able to get a significant amount of work coming your way. - 30528

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