Are you a non-voiceover professional who needs voice recording advice? Good! My name’s Joe Passaro, and I’m a professional voice-over artist. What does that mean, you might be asking? It means I’m an actor who uses my whole body when I act but all you get is my voice. A good voice actor can communicate what their face and body are doing through their voice. You as the listener can imagine who they are and what they’re doing simply by hearing them speak.
Now, there are a variety of voice-over artists with specific genres of voice-over they specialize in. Some do everything, some do one or two things, but most are somewhere in the middle. I for example work primarily on commercials, video games, explainer videos, brand videos, and eLearning. eLearning is a big one for me since I taught history and English for 10 years. Some things I don’t really do are IVR—interactive voice recording, essentially when you call a business and listen to dialing options on the phone. Or on-hold messaging. Things like “Did you know that getting your flu vaccinations can help reduce your chances of contracting the flu by as much as 60%” or whatever that year’s estimation is. I’ve done some of these before but for the moment it’s not what grabs me or even what I do best. I just prefer to do certain genres. Maybe that will change. Voice acting, like any craft, changes as you learn and as you grow.
Since You’re Not a Voice Actor…
But this is not why I’m doing these videos. I’m doing these videos because there are already tons of videos on how to be a voice actor or voice-over artist—same thing, by the way. Dee Bradley Baker’s iwanttobeavoiceactor.com is a great place to start for that. Instead, I’m doing these videos for those who don’t want to be a voice actor but still need to or want to record their voice and want to make it sound pretty good. And I thought in this day and age, why make a giant super long video or blog post on everything you might possibly need to record your voice well. Then overwhelm everyone with too much information. When technology allows us to make nice, compact, single-topic videos and make them very accessible?
Quick Tips for Quick Fixes
So these videos will be short—around 1-2 minutes long. They’ll be on a single topic intended for those who need to record their voice for a presentation, a podcast, their nascent anime, or even an eLearning module because you just don’t have the budget. But you still have need of voice-over. I’ll be honest, 99% of the time whatever it is you’re doing will sound much better with a pro. Almost to the point where it would be better not to have audio altogether because the voice-over is so bad it’s distracting. But that’s not what this is for. This is for those who need some quick, easy advice on making their voice recording sound as best they can. Without having to do the training, the years of experience and spend a huge amount of money on a studio space and equipment.
Homework
A professor’s trick is to always include a hook at the end of the first lesson to keep the students’ attention and interest. Usually this is a simple thought-provoking exercise connected to the overall course topic. So, I’ll leave you with this assignment until the next video: choose one or two voice-overs you hear on the radio, the TV, YouTube—whatever—and describe how you imagine what that person looks like, what they’re doing, and explain why they seem so well-suited to talk about that topic—whatever the commercial, video, or message is about.
Of course, if you’d rather hire a professional, millennial voice actor with lots of experience and training to take care of all this for you, I’d be happy to help! Just email direct: joe@joepassaro.com
