Recording Audiobooks at Home

Beginning Voice Acting Tips for Audiobooks

Step one... eNUNciate...

• Remember that the goal is to sound like you're talking in someone's ear, telling them a story, or telling what's actually happening. The more you can imagine what's happening in the text, the better you can deliver it as an event, not a book.
• Vary your pitch. Monotone puts people to sleep in a hurry. Listen to commercials, radio announcers, or (preferably) real people talking while standing in line, walking in public placies. Hear the music: hear how voices go up and down.
• Notice that voices don't necessarily go up at the end of every question, or down for every period. Also, punctuation marks like periods and commas are for grammar -- they don't always match up to the way people actually phrase their speech.
• Slow down and pause between sentences. Readers don't get a chance to stop and absorb what you say unless you give them silences to think about the words.
• Vary your rhythm. This is one I have problems with; I tend to fall into the same patterns. It's not just a matter of slowing down for drama, or speeding up for action. It's also a matter of breaking the rhythm, the way a fencer sets a rhythm and then breaks it. Think about the rhythms in music, in poetry. Think of a favorite speech and pat your leg in time to the beats: "THESE are the VOYAGES of the STARship ENTerprise..." Learn to recognize and use rhythm.
• My favorite trick in classical Greek poetry is the caesura: stopping in mid-foot of a poetic line, like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror saying, "Anitici......pation," perfectly expressing the meaning of the word.
• Play with breathy versus reedy sounds. Learn to control whether your voice is in the back of your mouth or closer to the front.
• When you're in a room by yourself, read aloud! Read aloud in the bathroom.
• Stand up straight and use all the tips you were taught in school chorus or in church: opening your mouth, yoga breathing, etc.
• Keep hydrated, not just while recording, but in general. Milk products and greasy foods tend to cause mucus build-up for a few hours after eating, so avoid them. Taking a note from Andy Serkis who had to do terrible things to his voice while voice recording Gollum, I lace my drink of water with a dab of honey to help soothe my throat.
• To fight sinus congestion and asthma, before every recording session, I take a hot shower and inhale steam. I run hot water on my throat and chest and sing in the shower, doing simple warm-up voice exercises from high school chorus. If I'm congested, I'll use my neti pot. (See my Five Tips for Fighting Sinus Infections for more). I finally broke down and went to an allergy specialist -- I've found a daily nasal inhaler is better for sinus infection prevention than allergy tablets or pills (which tend to dry out vocal chords as well as nasal passages, by the way).