10 Habits for Voice Actors

Feb 5

Voice acting is more than just speaking into a microphone or making funny voices. It’s about maintaining your body as an instrument and building your business. In order to make sure you can spend long hours in the booth (and get enough jobs to actually get into it), you need to have healthy behaviours that give you the strength, endurance, and flexibility you need.

Today’s post is all about what healthy habits for voice actors are, plus some tips for how to incorporate them into your daily life.

First off, it’s important to remember that building a habit takes time. The early stages of a new habit are the hardest, as you may well know if you’ve ever tried to start a workout regimen or quit smoking. You just have to stick to it using whatever willpower, techniques, and sneaky tricks you can until it becomes automatic. I wish there was a magic number for this threshold, but there isn’t. One day you’ll realize that you haven’t needed to force or trick yourself into performing the habit you want and it’s been running on autopilot.

The best advice I can offer at the start is to focus on one habit at a time. It’s tempting to start building new habits all at once, but that’s like walking up sixteen flights of stairs with two full armloads of groceries when you have to go to the bathroom, rather than taking the elevator. Sure, it’s possible, but why make it harder on yourself?

A much easier approach is to build the first habit you want to have, then do what’s called habit stacking. Basically, use a habit you have already built as the cue for the new habit you would like to build. For example, if you would like to start stretching every morning, then use the habit of turning on your coffee maker as your cue to start stretching. Just like that, you’ve built the habit of stretching while waiting for your coffee to brew.

I’ll go into more detail about strategies to form acting habits in a future post, but knowing these tips should help you get a head start on incorporating these 10 habits into your daily voice acting routine:

Warm ups don’t have to be complicated. They can (and arguably should) be simple, easy, and effective. There is something to be said for intensive vocal exercises, as they can help train you out of your bad habits. However, those are better as acting workshops, rather than your daily routine. The goal with daily warm-ups is to relax your vocal cords and prepare your body for a potentially straining session, not exhaust your voice before you get into the booth.

Pick 3-5 exercises to help you get better at a particular skill you struggle with. For example, you can use tongue twisters if you struggle with articulation, or sirens if you experience a lot of voice cracks. Patsy Rodenburg’s book “The Right To Speak: Working With the Voice” is a treasure trove of valuable tools and exercises for voice work and can teach you how to build a daily warm-up routine that works specifically for you.

Here are some examples of some basic exercises you could start experimenting with:

Basic breathing exercises
- Lie on your back and place your hands on your belly. Breathe in to your belly (using your diaphragm) for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, then breathe out for 4 seconds. Repeat 4 cycles, then extend each step by one second - so in for 5, hold for 5, out for 5. Repeat for 4 cycles, then move up to 6, 7, and finally 8. This increases your lung capacity.
- Lie on your back and place your hands on your belly. Take a deep, diaphragmatic breath. Imagine you are keeping a piece of paper stuck to the ceiling by blowing through a drinking straw. Keep your air focused and steady. Lightly engaging your core muscles will help with this. If you start seeing spots, stop and let your breathing return to normal. Once you’re relaxed, take another deep breath and try again. See how long you can maintain a steady stream of air.
Lip trills
- Gently press your lips together and blow air through them, buzzing your lips together. Do a few buzzes like this as long as you can. After a bit of this, slowly allow your vocal cords to come together to start humming. There shouldn’t be a harsh start to the hum, rather it should sound like it fades in. Keep a steady tone. Do this a few times, then slowly and smoothly change the pitch of your hum up and down as you buzz. You shouldn’t feel any strain or tension in your neck or throat during this exercise.
Sirens
- After taking a deep, diaphragmatic breath, gently allow your vocal cords to come together in a high pitch, then smoothly bring the pitch of your sound down an octave. Take another breath, then repeat, going up instead of down. It should sound like a police siren. Do this a few times, then do down and up in the same out breath.
Jaw & tongue stretches
- Open your mouth and eyes as wide as you can, as if you’re a lion roaring. Then scrunch your face together as if you just ate a lemon. Do this a few more times. Stick out your tongue when you open your mouth, then curl it back as far as you can when you scrunch.
- Loosely hold your tongue between your lips. It should be relaxed, as flat and heavy as possible. While keeping your tongue relaxed and between your lips, say the 12 months of the year and the 7 days of the week. Don’t let your tongue tense up. It will sound really silly.
Tongue twisters
You probably already have a few favourite tongue twisters, but here’s a few I like:
- Unique New York
- Greta, the tittle tattle, prattled on about a little metal bottle (really emphasize those t’s!)
- Red leather yellow leather

Wow. What a concept. Breathing is important for more than just voice acting, Larissa.

Obviously, but there’s a wrong way to breathe. Throughout our lives, we tend to compensate for pain and discomfort in our bodies in strange ways. If you ever received an injury as a child, you probably have a habit of standing or moving in a way that would prevent that injury from flaring up, even if the injury is completely healed. The same applies to the breath. A lot of us end up breathing high, shallow breaths during day to day life to compensate for past trauma, so deep, diaphragmatic breaths require conscious effort to re-learn.

Check in with yourself several times throughout the day and notice how you are breathing. Are they deep, or shallow breaths? Pick a cue that happens several times randomly throughout your day as your reminder to check in, such as receiving a notification on your phone.

You don’t have to be a marathon runner or a body-builder to be a voice actor. (It won’t stop you from being a voice actor either!) But since voice acting is such a physical job, it makes sense that your body - your instrument - is tuned and ready. When building your exercise regimen, consider this:

Cardio is super important for lung capacity & endurance.
Strength training is good for posture maintenance & endurance.
Yoga is good for releasing tension that blocks your breath.

Figure out what area you need to put the most focus on and work on building a regimen that helps you improve as a voice actor. Spend some time getting used to your body so you know when your voice needs a break and how to quickly recover. Pick a time in your routine when it makes the most sense to exercise, and find an accountability partner to help set and meet your exercise goals.

There’s a reason why every voice over coach or singing instructor mentions this. It works.

A study published by the US National Library of Medicine states that “Systemic hydration refers to fluid within body and vocal fold tissue.”

Your vocal folds actually have fluid reservoirs within them to help them stay hydrated. Hydrated vocal cords are more durable and flexible than dry ones, which means you can last longer and sound better when your entire system is properly hydrated.

When you swallow water, the water doesn’t go anywhere near your vocal cords - if it did, you’d end up coughing (we’ve all swallowed water down the wrong pipe before, it’s awful). In order to keep your vocal cords lubricated for your recording session, you have to make sure those fluid reservoirs are full long before you step into the booth.

It’s generally best to drink the fully recommended 64 fl. oz. per day to keep everything fully lubricated and soft, but at the very minimum you should be drinking 3-4 glasses of water in the 12 hours leading up to your recording session.

To start building a habit of drinking more water every day, I recommend using the habit stacking technique. Pick 5 - 6 regular habits or sensations you have every day, and use them as a cue to drink a glass of water. For me, I used meals, whenever I felt a headache coming on, and brushing my teeth before bedtime. Now, whenever I have those cues or my mouth or throat feels the tiniest bit dry, I reach for my water bottle. A second piece of advice is to have lots of water bottles around your house and workstation. If you live in a country with tap water that is safe to drink, this is a really easy way to help yourself stay hydrated, as it’s easy to quickly fill each bottle whenever it’s empty.

As with singing, having full range of motion for the diaphragm is crucial for a voice over artist. Proper posture ensures that your diaphragm can lower itself to its maximum depth, your lungs can fill themselves to their maximum volume, and your vocal cords can vibrate with maximum consistency. This video explains how the diaphragm works.

When standing, your feet should be about shoulder-width apart, your knees soft, and your ears, shoulder, and hips stacked on top of one another. Imagine a string going from the middle of your hips all the way up through the crown of your head, pulling you up into the ceiling. There should be no pinching or strain in this posture. It’s a subtle difference, but the change it makes in how much air you can take in at once is significant.

If you find yourself taking lots of shallow, weak breaths high up in your chest, chances are your shoulders are slumped or curled inwards. It could also mean that you’ve cranked your shoulders too far back, so look in a mirror to see what the culprit is. If you’re taking in a lot of air, but have a lot of voice cracks or a weak tone, your hips or neck are likely out of alignment.

Find a simple, frequent cue in your life to use as a reminder to check your posture. For example: every time you see the colour red, take a second to observe your posture and correct it.

This is the habit I struggle with the most. I find it difficult to practice for the sake of practicing, so I use auditions for my practice. For every audition, I pick a skill I want to work on improving - right now it’s refining my punch and roll technique and releasing tension in my neck.

The important thing is to pick a specific technique or skill you want to get better at. Practice without an intention can keep you spinning your wheels or, even worse, ingrain bad vocal habits. If you’re not sure what to work on next, work with a coach who can help guide you.

Find ways to incorporate practice into your daily routine. Get a buddy to critique you and keep you inspired. You could work with your mentor (if you’re lucky enough to have one already), or post excerpts of your practice sessions on your social media (this has the added benefit of giving you good content to build your social media following!)

If you’re at all interested in animation or audiobook narration, you’ll need to build a repertoire of character voices that you can call upon anytime. You can have a lot of fun with this! Experiment with different vocal qualities. Pitch, pace, rhythm, resonance, attitude, gender, accent, and affectations (such as a lisp or stutter) are different elements that you can mix and match to create a completely unique sound!

Pick one voice and spend most of the day (as much as you can before you start annoying strangers or loved ones) speaking in that voice. Build a whole character for this voice, their hopes, dreams, and fears. Find their ‘hook’ - the sentence that helps you remember that voice. A good example of a hook is the classic “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!” line from Midnight Cowboy to get into the Brooklyn accent.

How do you know a character voice is ready for the world to hear? Simple. Can you sing all of “Happy Birthday” as that character, without hurting your voice or losing the character? If yes, then you’ve got a character voice you can put onto your demo reel or use in a last minute audition that will blow the casting directors away!

Your mental habits are just as important as physical ones. What are the thought habits you have about your acting? Are they constructive, or demoralizing?

Monitor your thoughts as you practice your acting skills (but not during a job! Be in the moment for a job) to see if there’s anything that could be getting in your way. Bring those thoughts to a trusted friend or therapist to help you either transform them into something helpful or let them go completely.

This is a hard habit to build, since it requires almost constant awareness, full self-honesty, and unflinching bravery. Daily meditation, journaling, or yoga are great ways to practice mental awareness, but this is one of those habits where no quick trick exists. You just have to put in the hard work.

Finding work is the most important, yet most difficult aspect of voice acting. That’s because the job of an actor isn’t to get work - it’s to audition for work.

There are lots of different platforms and methods for finding auditions - the ones you focus on will depend on what kind of voice acting you want to do. Start simple. Spend some time in voice acting communities you want to become a part of on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and you’ll organically find the reputable sources of work. A few places to start are the Indie Narrators and A VO’s Journey Facebook groups. You’ll have to be accepted by the moderators of these groups, but the value they provide is incredible.

Rather than mindlessly scrolling through your instagram feed, read some of the conversations in these groups to passively absorb their wisdom. I guarantee you’ll feel more inspired.

Once you know where to look for auditions, start auditioning! Pick a time every week to record a few auditions (or more if your schedule allows for it). Keep sending auditions until you are no longer attached to the outcome. Then you know it’s a habit.

I cannot stress enough the importance of understanding the basics of audio engineering. Not only will it make it easier for you to send in high quality auditions (which will increase your chances of booking the job), but you’ll also be more relaxed when you step into a professional studio to record. Knowing proper mic technique and what kind of errors can be fixed in post will make it easy for engineers and clients to work with you, since they can guarantee they will receive easy to edit files that sound amazing.

Similar to the “practice” habit we talked about earlier, pick a different editing skill to learn every time you record an audition. Learn how to set your recording levels, how to use your DAW (digital audio workstation - Audacity is most likely what you’ll start using), how to read spectrograms, and some basic sound effects you can use to make your sound clearer for casting directors.

So, to summarize:

There’s lots of little things you can do every day to improve your acting and business skills, as well as strengthen and tune your instrument to keep your voice strong and healthy for a long day in the booth. Come up with a specific plan for how you will incorporate these habits into your daily routine, but don’t try starting them all at once. After you’ve settled into one of these habits, move on to the next one, using the habit stacking technique I mentioned.

Let me know in the comments how you plan to incorporate some of these habits into your life!

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About Me

Larissa is a professional audiobook narrator, voice over artist, and actor. With her home recording studio in Vancouver, B.C., she is able to spend her time doing what she loves most - becoming a conduit for stories that resonate with us.