Happy New Year! In 2023, if you want to improve dramatically as a voice actor, there is one thing you need to start doing all the time. In this video Gabby tells you what that is, and why it's so important.
Number One Secret to Getting Better in Voice Acting! - 3:43
Ho ho ho, bitches! It's another edition of the Gift of Gab for the holidays, and today I'm going to answer a question that came through the YouTube channel. So Dave Edwards asked, "Could you describe what you would recommend as a daily VO practice regimen... regime... regimen? I don't know, whatever, for beginners." Yes, yes I can the answer. Honestly is... read. Read everything all the time, practice reading. Why is this so critical?
All right, let's get into some of the reasons. Number one: you have got to desensitize yourself to the sound of your own voice, so reading aloud is absolutely your number one practice. Exercise every day, multiple times per day, set aside 5, 10, 15 minutes and read aloud! You have to get used to hearing yourself. I know it's weird, right? But honestly, one of the main reasons why beginners aren't very good at voiceover is because they spend so much time listening to the sound of their own voice they forget about the copy, they forget about the words on the paper. You have to not obsess about the sound of your voice. You have to sort of normalize it. Number two: reading aloud is what strengthens your vocabulary, right? It strengthens your overall word knowledge and that is such a big deal. Voice over actors, well I mean, we're kind of, by definition, highly literate people. You have to be to do this for a living. Reading aloud also strengthens your sight reading skills or cold reading skills, which I don't know why, but there's some notion out there that we have time to practice, right? That we get our scripts in advance and we get to read through them and figure out what we're going to do. No we don't! We're given, like, five minutes. Here's this piece of paper, go read! And if you're someone who's dealing in long form like audiobooks, come on now, you're not reading the whole book before you then read the whole book. It's called sight reading for a reason. There are loads of people in this industry and people who support this industry, like talent agents, who say that we are just professional readers, so yeah, read. That's the key. Read, read, read some more. Every once in a while, I will encounter someone who tells me they want to do this for a living but that they hate to read. NO! You can't hate to read if you want to do this! You have to love reading, you have to love words, you have to love finding the meaning in those words and finding the author's meaning in those words. So happy holidays, I will see you guys in the new year. Get to reading. Read. Read! Go read. Now! Go read.
704-674-8294 / GabrielleNistico.com / gabby@voiceovervixen.com
Gabrielle Nistico, Gabby Nistico, The Voiceover Vixen, The Business First VO Coach, #VoiceoverVixen #VoiceOnFire #BusinessFirstVOCoach Voiceover, Charlotte, North Carolina, Voiceover Demo, Voiceover Coaching Advice, Working Actors, Los Angeles, New York, How to Be a Better Voice Actor, cold reading, actor training, reading comprehension, cold reading, sight reading, audiobooks