I’ve mentioned before the difference in culture between doing voice work in the US and here in the UK. One key thing is that training and mentoring seems to be given much more importance for voice artists in the States. It’s something that people do throughout their career as they try to learn new techniques that make their voiceovers more effective.

Although we don’t seem to have that kind of on-going training infrastructure here I’m certainly a great believer in trying out and learning new things to improve your voiceover performance.

Anyway I was just watching an interesting video produced by voice coach Nancy Wolfson. I’ve mentioned her before because I love her rock star styling and the way she presents her sessions like she’s fronting a rock band (she looks like she needs some wedge monitors on the front of the stage to put her foot on). She’s got a cool, distinctive presentation style for some really interesting voice technique stuff.

This video is about how to help male VO’s relax.  At a training event Nancy gets a male voice artist on stage to do several takes of a read for a TV ad.  She does a lot of stuff with him on breathing and changing the emphasis of words but the guy is just not quite getting the relaxed note she wants.  In the end she reckons the best way to relax is…… for him to lay on the floor. Interesting technique!

Luckily my booth is big enough for that but most wouldn’t be!    Of course it turns out that she doesn’t mean you should actually record lying down but the point she’s making is that your muscles can “learn” what it feels like to be really relaxed….and then your body will “remember” that feeling when you’re standing up doing the read.

Actually for my money he did his best read before he laid on the floor – but nevertheless it helped her to make a great visual point about the importance of knowing how to be really relaxed to get the best read.
An interesting presentation to make an important point.