I joined that site recently and I must say that it has been a great help for a student Voice Actor! Tons of articles and advice and interviews. You can upload a sound clip for them to critique roughly once a month, and they have an audition contest each month.

The contest is sorta fun for a newbie. First you have to try to record something that sounds vaguely professional, then you have to work over the file, clean it up, turn it into an MP3 and then upload it. Good practice all the way around!

Anyway, I recorded a bunch of different takes on the audition script, and then just saved them on my computer and spent the next several days chasing my kids around the house – completely forgetting all about the recording.

Went back yesterday and listened to the clips — and it was GREAT! I came to the clips completely cold, having forgotten most everything about them (Early Alzheimer’s, I know) and it was almost like listening to a total stranger!

I could easily identify things that sounded amateurish (yeah, most of the clip, I know) and also things that I liked. It was a completely different experience from listening to your recording right after you do it.

So why don’t you practice with some scripts and record your efforts and then let them lie around for a few days before you listen to them? I think you will be surprised.

And yes, I know you can’t do that in real life — but we are learning here! Cut yourself some slack!

Any of you out there who are 14 years old may skip this lesson, but for the rest of us who were NOT born in the 1990′s, you probably need to learn about this, LIKE it or NOT!

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Bob Souer for putting this up after his trip to Voice 2010!

SocialMediaVO.

VOICE OVER MICROPHONE SELECTOR | Edge Studio.

Not only is Cold Reading important, just being able to read the thing accurately and correctly aloud is important!

Like my last teacher said, just read aloud for 15 – 20 minutes a day and watch how you progress. It has sure helped me.

Why Cold Reading Skills Are a Must For Voice Actors | Voices.com.

Bob

Jeffrey Kafer Voice blog.

The copy writer thinks you’re an illiterate mouth breather, the director thinks you’re a prima dona who can’t listen, the engineer thinks you are the luckiest SOB on earth to make what you make for reading out loud, the client thinks you’re a large, needless, debit on his personal compensation, and the target audience out there trudges on regardless, unaware that you even exist!

Just what the heck IS IT that you are DOING?

You, my friend, are performing magic.

You are doing something that these people not only cannot DO, they cannot even put it into words! You are doing something for which there is no vocabulary. You are making the Intellectual Leap.

Where the others proceed from A to B to C in a perfectly linear manner, the Voice Actor moves from A to B to Z.

The copy writer bashes out his words, vaguely relating to some product, and it makes it way to the hands of the director who tries to figure out how to describe something he can’t really put into words (make it a little more red!), all the client wants is the product name billboarded, and they all heave and strain and struggle mightily to achieve something that is unnameable; and that unnameable thing is what you do.

You are the one who can take that cold, flaccid, lifeless script and literally give it the breath of life. You are the one who can divine the intent, the message, the audience, and fashion the perfect voice to reach into those people’s heads and touch their emotions and shape their thoughts without them even knowing it.

You were born with a powerful but crude tool. You spent years studying and practicing the arcane art, and finally one day you knew you were ready and you closed your eyes and you took a deep breath and you made The Leap.

That is what you are paid to do, and that is what they can’t do, and that, my friend, is magic.