Voice Acting Exercises | 6 Exercises to Improve Your Voice Acting

Voice acting exercises! We’re asked a lot at for a comprehensive list of effective voice acting exercises. Well, it depends what area of voice acting you specialise in for your work, games, animations, audiobook characters and so on, but here are the very basics that every voice actor should do regularly. First of all, the most important exercise every voice actor should do is to sleep well! Not much of an exercise you may think, but after a heavy day in the recording studio, a decent night’s sleep, helps you reset your hard working vocal folds, and decent sleep, together with keeping your hydration levels really high with pure water, being sensible with alcoholic drinks, eating well, and generally looking after your health will pay enormous dividends to the quality and consistency of your voice. Secondly, hum! A very easy exercise to do whenever you’re alone having a walk, driving a car, or in any spare time, is to hum low down. Keep to one note for a while, and then slide your humming up and down. Resonant humming helps you relax as well, which is a bonus, but low resonant humming helps to exercise your larger vocal folds, that are often only used as a sort of human subwoofer in your vocal apparatus. So, get to exercise all areas of your voice equipment, as well as improving your general resonance, and this will improve the flexibility in creating character voices of all registers from low to high. Thirdly, you should do daily stretching exercises, to keep enunciation high. Its best to get a daily routine of a short list of the ones that most benefit you and the age you are and the type of body you have, but here is my personal daily list that takes me 10 minutes in the morning before I get into the voice booth for the first script of the day. 1 Head turns, not jerking, left to right and up and down. 2- Massage your shoulders to release tensions or ask a friend to do this from behind. Tensions are the enemy of the resonant and flexible voice. 3- The big yawn exercise is great ñ just open wide and waggle from left to right, gently. If it turns into a proper yawn, that’s fine. The half-yawn is a good base for many a good character voice too, try it! 4 Lip trills are good too for enunciation, just sound like an old telephone, purse your lips and trill away. 5 Tongue waggle! Get that tongue wagging and try to achieve the holy grail of describing a perfect circle with the tip of your tongue! I’ve never met anyone who can do the tongue circle properly! 6 Finally its QEQR! The tiny, taut Q sound, the big stretch of the mouth wide for the E, the tiny Q again and then a wide R for the big final! You don’t need to actually say the letters, it’s the stretching that’s important. Do these or a more customised set of voice acting exercises every day and you’ll be optimised for another day of scripts in your voice booth! If you’d like to know more about working in Voice Acting, please check out our comprehensive voice acting course which includes 4 hours of video-based training hosted by myself and Katy Brody, covering voice over, audio books, animations and game voice acting work. We also have sections on how to choose your home studio equipment, and to set up your recording facility. We also have a fully downloadable resource document, and even sample agreements that you are welcome to adapt for your own use. So please find out more at voice over and good luck for the future! Start the Voice Acting Course Here: Watch Voice Acting Exercises Video Here: