All the amazing cartoons from Mickey Mouse to Lion King had actors behind the camera performing character voices. Nowadays characters acting in higher demand, because with the spread of media distribution there so much production of different shows. Character voice acting is the most exciting type of voice-over jobs.
For me, it could be challenging to describe to you how to tense a throat, move a jaw and tongue placed, move but I will try.
To change your voice for character acting you need to practice it. Voice changing is about skill and not so much of a talent. Practice impressions of other voices, musical instruments, animal sounds and you will develop that skill in your voice.
To master any skill takes a long time. A lot of boring practice and unfortunately with impressions this means spending a lot of time on your own talking to yourself. If you think of a place to practice it could be a shower, a commute in the car. Beware doing it on public transportation, may not be the best suitable place.
The idea is to use any possible opportunity to exercise the impression or character you want to be able to perform. Better practice in shorter periods but often. The longer practices can drain you too much and will not help that effectively built a muscle memory.
Practice purposely and targeted. Once you found what you do best with your voice, keep improving and developing that voice. Your body needs to remember how to perform that specific noise to the particular character or impression, then move to learn another character.
Because it is required to set your patience for a long time training. You may not acquire consistent performance very quickly. But don’t give up early. Keep exercising and looking for what you can do best with your voice, keep improving.
It is also important to train as at the time of real work, you need to be able consistently to deliver that character impression working with a voice which is not common to you. It is actually hard to deliver quality if you want others to pay for it.
While practicing, it is a good idea to seek feedback. Better from someone who understands it, who is a professional. You need to hear constructive criticism early and you need to take it without offense. The earlier you improve, the better you become.
Voice-changing training techniques
Don’t be shy to look and sound stupid. Because you may feel this way. Changing voice for acting requires a lot of mess around making noises and faces. But it is for a reason. You must pay attention to which muscles involved to make this or that sound.
Start practicing in front of a mirror. You will see that doing a certain voice is not only vocal cords and tongue job. It often includes your face mimic, your body movements and your emotional state. Training character voice-over while watching yourself in a mirror helps you get into the role and naturally deliver better performance.
Perfectly helpful would be if you have any theater background. But even without it, you can do great. Relax, get ready to look ugly, dum, funny or gross, like if you’d be doing an old lady witch voice. Sometimes you have to make that gross face to make that voice.
Do change your face mimics, stretch your neck or shorten it pushing head between your shoulders, play with a jaw position and keep making voices. Also, it is a good idea to record it all on the microphone so you can listen back and recognize which character you can do best and which did not go well and you need to change something.
It’s all about imagination, playing, having fun and being open. Very helpful would be the following exercise. Have the characters images printed or displayed on a monitor and create voices for them. Start from giving the character name, and them the traits, habits, age, etc. This will let you understand how your character laughs or cry, how they handle anger or show compassion. It starts living inside your brain, and when it is time to perform the play comes out naturally.
Once you played a bit with your voice and discovered what you can do good and what is not that great yet. It is time to take character acting seriously and consistently do exercises to train your voice. Trained voice will withstand longer-acting still delivering outstanding performance. Trained voice broadens your abilities to do more different noises to craft better characters.
(link to my course)I recommend you get great training in voice-acting designed to teach you the techniques most important in your early start-up career.
Once you know your character and discovered what noises can your mouth produces, give the character a fitting voice. If you think of it, it is very exciting to give a voice to a character. It becomes interactive and sort of bring life to the creature. Whether it is a robotic voice, little girl voice, creepy old voice, rough gangster voice, metallic robot voice, echoing mountain voice even AI assistant will become more alive with a voice.
To be capable of performing a wider range of voices, you need to learn and practice techniques for a whole lot of your body parts. Yes, making different voices requires more than tongue and vocal cords positioning as mentioned above.
Body movements are going along with good character impressions. If your character is funny and energetic for you being jumpy and spontaneously moving while voice acting can also be very productive and helpful. It will help you to enter the state and act like you are that character, and your body will help you to the rhythm it tight.
Also singing or onomatopoeia different objects will help you to discover and learn new sounds. Which you can use for scaling the variety of voices.
Character voice examples
Every character voice has some signature tone or a special way of sounding. Envision your character or better have a picture of it. Think of its personality and apply it to yourself. You must do it very well.
Acting is very important here. So regardless of what you are a tiny lady, you must be able to become a Grinch or if you a guy in 40s you have to be comfortable making the voice of Liza from Simpsons. Good for you it is not done on camera, so don’t be shy.
In your career, you may be required to make many different character voices. Use different techniques and approaches for the best results.
- To make grand, god-like, majestic voices you need to inject growl into the voice.
- To make higher-pitched voices for small characters not just make voice higher, but making voice shaking will add to the character’s tiny and fragile structure. Always consider the look of a character to make a matching voice. If you stretch your neck of the shoulders, you see how your voice changes even if you are not trying to act, just speak. Small creatures can be nervous, shaky, uncertain you become too. Use your physicality to shape the voice.
- Elderly like gnome or dwarf character voice would need your voice pitched, shaken and stretched.
- The deep-pitched voice you talk deeper and slower. Talking with confidence and maybe even impersonating a bigger figure of yourself may help. You inflate your breast and act like this. Sit your head deep between the shoulders and act.
- The “snooty” voice to make need you to speak with a precise and slow pace. Focus on your words and perhaps make that ending “s” in the words whistling. Keep your nose higher and head tilted a bit.
How to craft character voice
To better understand a character’s voice acting, think of it in simpler terms. Like it is a cookie recipe, change ingredients to get different flavors. Noise, rhythm, pitch, and accent are your key ingredients to many custom voices.
Noise can help to craft gangster, bandit or wolverine voice. It requires some graveling, this kind of phlegm in the back of your throat. It sounds sharp and raspy.
Rhythm can be used to distinguish different character types. Various pauses’ timing is specific to different personalities. Use them too.
Pitch is what makes voices so different. Simply changing it, you can sound whatever between a mouse Jerry to Elmo.
An accent adds to fit better the character’s origin. Many different languages have distinguished accent. For example, Britain accent in America perceived as soft at the end and rolling fading from word to word.
In contrast, the Russian accent would be more like strong cutting words ending, R sounds always like R in rocket nor like R in a car. You get the idea.
Pitch, accent, noise, and rhythm what you play to craft a character voice. Different character voice requires a different recipe.
Your homework to come up with the list of different characters and for each craft a recipe to describe and impersonate such character voice.
Pro Tip! To further improve character acting try adding voice defects like sizzle, lisp or stutter ads more personality to impersonating a character.
I have a detailed break down to simple components of different voice types you can do. You will learn how to use simple changes to produce up to a hundred distinctly different character voices in Voice Character Generator module of Blueprint To Voice-Over Freelance
Using Audacity software to improve character voice
Using audio editing software is one of many skills voice-over freelancers must-have. In some cases additional sound effects are very welcome to include in a demo, also background music or effects add to the overall atmosphere.
But be aware it is not always required when you do work for hire often time you asked not to do any post-editing, This is for production to do themselves as only they know what exactly they need a voice to be to fit the project.
Yours is to deliver a clean recording and them to do a variety of mixing to fit their needs. However, if the project requires you to deliver a post edited job, or you are working on a type of project where you have multiple roles, be ready to fulfill a sound engineer role.
Depending on the environment where the action is taking place, different sound effects must be used. Like if you playing a character being in the cave, or on a stadium, or on the highway, or underwater.
Audacity is a great tool to use to further add changes to your voice and create an ambiance.
Become amazing animation voice actor
Impressions of characters are predominantly a memory listening and observation-based exercise. It is a skill, not a talent. The depth and range of your voice may limit you to what voices you can accurately cover at that moment in time.
But over time practicing your voice will develop that tone deeper or higher. Have a growth mindset, if something didn’t work right away seek what you missing, find another approach, give it more time and practice until effort will bring fruits.
Try playing with your voice to discover your abilities. Repeat after other characters. Watch your favorite animation show and repeat after characters or try to speak like them. See how good you are doing and when found the best match, keep working towards this direction.
Here is one more tip. Try making different voices and noises to make yourself laugh. Record yourself playing and joking around, then listen to it, or play to someone to get feedback. Pick what you liked and keep developing that style of character play.
Do your research, do not only rely on your imagination on how a particular character should sound like. Search for examples and get inspired, little preparation can make a big difference.
It is all about the acting what makes you sound special, in fact, your character voice performance is 90% of acting and only 10% of voice qualities. Act like the character voice you making, the rest will follow.