Make your own Voice Demo/Reel

hello youtube family tash here and today i'm going to show you how to make your very own diy voiceover demo it is going to be a long one but hopefully you'll pick up some juicy wisdom nuggets along the way so without further ado let's get cracking a voiceover demo or real same thing different name depending on where you are is the single most important thing you have to help you book work as a voice-over actor it's essentially a portfolio of your work if you think about it for a second say you want to watch a movie on netflix you're flicking through and browsing you see something that looks interesting but there isn't a trailer so you have no idea what it's about you're probably not going to watch it right take that lesson and apply it to your voice if you don't have any demos people won't book you at all similarly if you don't have a demo in the style that the client is looking for that may deter them too now we hit a roadblock that's super annoying catch 22. you want to book work but you haven't done any work yet so people won't hire you because they want an experienced voice over actor with work they can showcase well never fear little youtube family the beauty of this industry is that you can do some serious faking it until you make it and no one is ever the wiser it is so easy to put together a high quality demo even if you're starting from a place where you have no knowledge whatsoever about sound or voiceover if that is the case it may take a little longer for you to wrap your head around things but don't give up everything that i've learned about sound and audio has been self-taught i spent countless hours on youtube read a bunch of textbooks and as i got more and more work i befriended engineers who were able to answer my questions when i first started auditioning as a voice over actor i had something like seven different reels with three to five clips on each reel and i had personally created every single one of those clips in my wardrobe if you've seen the setup that i have now you may have noticed it's a little more extravagant than a wardrobe but just 12 months ago like nearly everyone else i started in a wardrobe from there i upgraded to what i called my blanket fort which was another cheap alternative that i made from pvc pipes and the joins and for acoustic blankets and all the work i got from those two cheap alternatives funded the hectic setup that you see now i just want to reinforce this this dembox eco 200 is not where i started i started in a blanket port just like you so where the fudge do we start with a voiceover demo well you've got two alternatives when it comes to voiceover reels you can either learn the skills yourself and put it together yourself or you can find someone who offers voice demos as a service and see them i am always going to be a proponent of the first option if you can do it yourself please do it may be a painful exercise learning all these skills especially if you have never touched audio gear in your life but by making your own demo you'll then have the skills required to do the jobs from home when they start rolling in the jobs you'll likely start with will require some sort of home studio setup if you don't know how to use the gear you have you won't be able to do the jobs or it will just seriously stress you out nearly all of the voice over work i do currently is from my home studio that's the trend these days it used to be that you got hired through a voiceover agent and then you went into the studio to do the job but now it is entirely possible to sustain a six-figure voiceover career from the comfort of your own home wearing what i call my hermit clothes without an agent if you are willing to learn the skills as a rather obsessive person another thing i also love about the diy option is that you'll also be able to redo your reels as many times as you want so as you get better at editing audio you get more confident as an actor or as your voice ages you may want or need to update your reels so it reflects how you currently sound on the other hand you can always pay someone just to do it for you i will not judge you if that's the route you take because i was even considering doing that up until recently because i wanted a different perspective and some clips that sounded different to my usual style of editing the one piece of advice i can give you if you are in that situation is to do your research listen to various companies work make sure that it's good quality you may need to save up more money and pay for someone on the more expensive side because their work is clearly better quality if you want to get these done on the cheap they will sound cheap that's just the way it goes the good news is if you find someone who does great work you know your demos will sound great from the get go but for the purposes of this video we've decided to go the diy route which is great news because i'd have nothing else to talk about if we didn't in reality the first step would be to decide on your recording equipment and setup but that would take me another nine hours to explain so i'm going to assume you've already done that and you're ready to put a demo together i'll put up other videos that go into more detail about your equipment setup editing to help you out if you really are starting from square one step one the first thing to do is to decide what type of demo you want to put down there are so many different categories of voice over work so you've got commercial or advertising work which is as it sounds corporate work which includes things like e-learning company anthem videos and training videos narration or documentary work things like audio books animation in film and tv you've got foreign language dubbing which is becoming more and more prevalent promo work which is very similar to advertising but often refers to the promotion of a new song movie or tv series so think on spotify when they say pink's new album listen now that kind of stuff and then you have ivr work which i think stands for interactive voice response but it's just a fancy word for telephone voices my biggest advice for the voiceover world is to cast the net wide when you start so try to do everything you can to figure out what you like doing and seeing where you generate work instead of trying to use your brain to figure out what your niche is let the market decide in an ideal world you want to match what you like doing with what people want to pay you to do which isn't going to always be the case but that's that's the aim for the sake of this example we're going to pick the commercial category because it's easy and quick step two next you need to try not to hate me too much because i'm about to tell you to do some research you need to get to know the category you've chosen and figure out where your voice will fit in everyone's voice can fit in every category but there'll be certain things that you're more likely to get hired for than others simply because of the way your voice sounds for example i consistently get hired by universities as a relatable authentic student type voice i am less likely to be hired by nike to do one of their gritty urban voiceovers because my voice just doesn't naturally sound like that they will have better options you've probably been listening to advertisements your whole life but you'll quickly realize that you haven't really been paying attention to them you actually need to go on the hunt for advertisements and really listen to them you can listen to ads on spotify troll through youtube watch youtube ads or watch tv but try and mimic the voices you're hearing it'll help you get a sense of how commercial voiceovers flow also make sure you're listening to ads in your own language i work in a few different accents and often find that commercial jobs differ depending on the country you're in u.s commercials for example are far more upbeat usually than uk commercials even if they both say they want a conversational read a great place to get ideas is to look for voice over agents websites you can scroll through their books and listen to the voice reels of other actors so find people with similar voices to you and see what demos they have step three now we need to find a script for a commercial reel you really only need 15 to 20 seconds per clip you'll want to find three to five of these short clips that have different styles and tones within them to show that you can do various things take my current us commercial reel for example i have six clips and it goes for about one minute and seven seconds we'll give it a quick listen so you can understand what i mean hormone free chicken cage free eggs fresh delicious local grown produce real food prepared by real chefs in real kitchens chick-fil-a it's the little things burial friends mama josie is your new kangaroo friend get your hip hop on and hop around with mama josie and her three joeys you have the power to defeat the mask get the vaccine and put your smile back where your mouth is be a superhero at no cost to you cape not included unexpected things happen well unexpectedly and moneyprovider.com knows that sometimes those unexpected things don't exactly fit in your expected budget the smooth creamy peanut butter the rich dark chocolate raises peanut butter cups get the sensation we know how you feel more lies a side of deception nothing new so we're going to be straight up we're better than that just overall better better.com money simple so that made sense there were six short excerpts all with various tones and styles bulk of it gave off the authentic and relatable young person vibes because that's where i tend to book most of my work luckily for me i made my reel because listening back to it i feel like i could probably redo some of the clips on there yet again there are an abundance of places you can find or get ideas for scripts you can use something you've heard before either an actual advertisement or something from a demo on a voiceover agents website you can adapt something you've heard before taking a script you like and making it unique or you can simply write something from scratch i have done all of the above you definitely don't have to be super creative to write an advert style script here's one that i adapted yesterday and this is what we're going to use as our example i decided to go with a natural warm style braid for a pet food company because that's my happy place why choose pet fresh well at pet fresh your pet's health is our priority our food is made with 100 natural ingredients real meats fruits and veggies and no fillers or artificial preservatives but the real reason we're just gone crazy for a healthy happy pup facelifts and all there's a train of thought that you shouldn't use real brand names or companies in your real pieces to avoid copyright issues i personally have never had any issues and i've done that you're only using the recordings to show off your own skills you won't be selling them or generating any income from them from the demos themselves obviously try to avoid using huge names like apple or nike however if you'd feel safer just invent brand names no one will ever know step three now it's time for music this is something i find always helps however you don't necessarily have to do this at the start i like to choose my music before i even begin to record why because i'll often record my vocals with the music playing lightly in my ear it's no secret that music can make us feel certain ways think back to your teenager days when you're an emotional wreck for whatever reason but you chose to listen to sad songs to make it even worse same concept here the music you choose will inform the read and if you choose music later it may not match the read you have recorded you've got so many options at your fingertips for music youtube audio library is a great place to start they've got a bunch of royalty-free music tracks that might work for you for more options you can then look to sites like pond5 epidemic sound or art list some sites have the option to pay per song you use which is ideal if you don't intend to be using it consistently and others require a subscription fee you can try a lot of these sites for free so if you plan on doing a lot of recording in a short amount of time you can sign up for a month-long free trial just to get things started just don't tell them i told you that this is the music i decided to go with for our example [Music] step four record the vocals i could do a whole nine hour series on how to go about recording vocals there is so much to talk about from the technical side of things right the way to the performance side of things so i'm not going to dive into heaps of detail here because i'll get to the nitty-gritty in other videos in summary there are three things to think about the equipment you'll need your recording space and the performance aspect in terms of the equipment what you'll need is a microphone an audio interface depending on whether you have an xlr or a usb microphone and a computer with audio editing software such as adobe audition or audacity to get clean audio you're also going to want to find something to use as a pop filter and a space which is conducive to getting clean audio a pop filter is a device which helps prevent aggressive pops of air getting into your microphone when you say words like pop i used to put a stocking over my microphone in fact the one that i have now there's a metal mesh over the front however a lot of them come with something more like the fabric of the stocking over it in terms of your recording space lots of beginners use a well padded wardrobe yes this would likely send shivers down an audio engineer's spine but it is more than sufficient to get you started on your voiceover journey i've gone through three iterations of recording space as i mentioned before first there was my wardrobe back in sydney duvet over my head then there was a blanket fort and finally there is my far too expensive but crispy and beautiful denvox eco200 once you're all set up i'd highly recommend you find a way to play the music you intend to use lightly in your ears whilst you record i say lightly because if you have it too loud your microphone is going to pick it up and you'll have this undercurrent of soft audio in your actual recording keep recording the piece until you're happy with it remember if you make a mistake you can cut around it it doesn't have to be one continuous read to help you out these are some useful tips i've learned along the way to help you ace your recording one read the script a couple of times in a row every time you do a take you settle into it and often sound less stilted after you've read it a few times so often the latter takes will be better two wet clothing made from natural fabrics if you are wearing layers of polyester and you move around whilst you speak the microphone will pick up fabrics rustling and your demo will sound just as bad as i look trying to demo this point three remember to breathe i have to remind myself to do this all the time not only is breathing necessary to stop you dying it has a calming effect if an actor feels pressured because of an audience or just the fact that they're putting pressure on themselves they tend to mess up if this happens take a breath take a second take a breath and continue a proper breath if you freak out and start taking rapid breaths to try and catch up you'll just keep messing it up remember that you can stitch lines together even if you're in a live session explain to them that you can stitch lines together very rarely is a full read the actual full read that an actor did another note on breathing your microphone picks up everything including breaths it's better to pause and take a silent breath rather than trying to breathe quickly and keep powering through because that way you can easily cut the breath out in your edit and get a cleaner track if you're rapid breathing in a fast read it may blend with your speech and muddy some of the dialogue four keep your head off axis so you aren't talking directly into your mic what i mean by this is have the mic slightly sideways pointing at you rather than directly in front of you because that way it'll help reduce any plosives because any aggressive bursts of air from words will travel this way and your mic is here it's still picking up all of your sound but it'll get less of those aggressive bursts and it will make your audio sound better number five this one's a weird one eat a green apple before you record that's right a green apple it sounds really weird but apparently it is a thing and it has helped me apparently it's a well-known trick in the voiceover world there is a specific type of acid in those apples that helps flush away mucus and clean the mouth so it gets your mouth moving more smoothly and reduces mouth clicks who would have thought hopefully by the end of your session you'll have a read or two you're happy with that may sound something like this why choose pet fresh well at pet fresh your pet's health is our priority our food is made with 100 natural ingredients real meats fruits and veggies and no fillers or artificial preservatives but the real reason but the real reason we're just gone crazy for uh we're just doggone crazy for a healthy happy pop facelifts facelicks and all step five once you've done your recording you're going to want to start splicing things up and treating the audio again this is one of the things that i could spend nine hours explaining and over the course of the rest of the year i will spend that long explaining it but that's for another day so for now it's enough to say that there are certain things you can do to audio to make it sound better generally what i do is apply basic noise reduction if necessary de-click apply equalization apply compression and adjust volume levels by normalizing or amplifying these are things you do to the vocal recording itself think of it like editing a photo you can slightly change the colors you can sharpen it a bit or you can give it a bit more blur you don't want it to look significantly different to what you started with but you can definitely enhance it knowing how to edit audio even just in a very basic way is something you will need to know if you want to become a voiceover artist these days because so much of the work is done from home and home studios so after working some splice magic and treating the reed this is what you may should hopefully will have why choose pet fresh well at pet fresh your pet's health is our priority our food is made with 100 natural ingredients real meats fruits and veggies and no fillers or artificial preservatives but the real reason we're just dog gone crazy for a healthy happy pup facelifts and all six once you've got everything where you want it and you've treated the audio you're going to want to mix in the music before you can even think about mixing you'll need the music to be the desired length you can either chop it up and match portions of the music to shorten it or in some pieces of software you remix the clip to be the desired length the program will spit out a remix of the song close to whatever length you specify as close as it can possibly get another great thing to do is if all this sounds too complicated is the good old fade in fade out works perfectly every time you choose the section of the song that you like best you fade in when your voice is going to come in and you fade out when the read is done now when i say mix the music what i mean is that you need to make sure that your vocals punch through the music that both the music and your voice are at the correct level so you can hear both clearly one of the big mistakes i see people making is having the music too loud so it's often distracting at the end of the day these demos are about your voice so your voice needs to stand out everything else is just there to make your voice sound even better when mixing a voiceover job audio engineers often do this thing called ducking in simple terms it's simply turning down the volume of the music every time vocals come in and then returning it to its original volume the second the vocals stop you can do this in most audio software it's a bit of a time-consuming process if you don't have some external bits of hardware but if you've got the time and you want to make your demos sound great and you want to make your voice sound super clear it is a great skill to learn i never did this in my first demos i just made sure that the voice track was significantly louder than the music and the sound effects once you're all done with that you'll be left hopefully with something like this why choose pet fresh well at pet fresh your pet's health is our priority our food is made with 100 natural ingredients real meats fruits and veggies and no fillers or artificial preservatives but the real reason we're just gone crazy for a healthy happy pub facelifts and all cuckoo step seven the last thing you may want to consider is adding sound effects this is an additional step definitely not required but it can often make something sound even more like it was a real advertisement or animation at some stage in its life you can find sound effects in the same way as royalty-free music use youtube audio library or find royalty-free sound effect sites such as pond5 where you can just buy the sound effects that you want just to demo the point i found a cute little sound effect to add to the end of the clip we're working on so drum roll please this is the finished 20 second clip for my voice reel why choose pet fresh well at pet fresh your pet's health is our priority our food is made with 100 natural ingredients real meats fruits and veggies and no fillers or artificial preservatives but the real reason we're just don't gone crazy for a healthy happy pub facelicks and all and there you have it a nice new clip you can use to show off your voiceover skills now you just have to do that all over again as many times as you want to create a collection of clips that show off your voice in the best light possible it may be a bit daunting and time-consuming the first time but you'll learn so many invaluable skills from doing this yourself and it will definitely get quicker the more you do it to put this demo together took me around half an hour but back in the day it probably would have taken me closer to three or four hours i would have been right there with you on struggle street if you've made it through to the end kudos that was definitely longer than i planned it to be let me know if this helped you out in the comments or if you've got any more questions throw them at me and i will try and answer as many as i can also remember to hit this is the subscribe button if you want to keep up with the random assortment of things that i post

Channel: Diary of an Actor

Views: 12,515

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Id: ONDu2aBcGhM

Length: 20min 33sec (1233 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022