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Strengthening your singing career takes time, training, and dedication to the craft. Similarly to most creative roles, finding work is often the most challenging part, scouring the internet for opportunities to supplement your income while using the skills you’ve gained.
Voice acting is an industry many singers don’t consider, but it uses the same skills you’ve already worked on throughout your singing career. The industry also includes several singing roles, from jingles to fictional singing characters; there is a significant amount of work for those with excellent vocals.
So, let’s take a look at how voiceover work can boost your singing career, the transferrable skills that make you a perfect candidate, and the steps required to kickstart your new voiceover journey.
Transferrable Skills for Voiceover
The skills that make up a successful singing career often overlap with the skills required for voice acting.
Characterisation
When it comes to a perfect voice acting performance, it’s all about emotion. Character work will involve a range of emotions which must each be communicated through tone of voice and vocal characteristics. A scene requiring voiceover might involve a character’s descent into pure rage or their ecstatic reaction to good news, and this is a similar process to singing a song that represents those same feelings.
It’s not just about the lyrics or the script; the emotion should be obvious in the voice and breathe life into the character.
Vocal Versatility
The ability to adapt your voice to specific content is invaluable in the voiceover industry. Commercial roles will usually require more straightforward, attention-grabbing, clear communication. However, characters can be placed in any genre, from a wicked witch in a children’s cartoon to the narration of a hard-hitting documentary.
Versatile voices that understand how to best fit with the style, genre, and medium of any given performance will be hired for the widest range of work, and singers understand how switching up their vocal style can create a better fit for a project.
Vocal Technique
Singers are well-versed in the technical aspects of their craft, such as breath control, vocal projection, tonal variation, and vocal warm-ups. It takes years of practice and dedicated training to gain these skills, which can be adapted perfectly to voiceover. This unique level of professionalism and audio mastery is a valuable asset in the VO industry, and all gained from a singing career.
Furthermore, technical recording skills will also be to your benefit. If you’re already up to speed on mic placement, audio interfaces, and acoustic treatment, then you’re good to go – Bonus points if you’ve got a home studio!
Singing Voiceover Work
Some voiceover gigs directly feature singing. Poetry-like scripts require a melodic touch, and adverts often create original music to place between the more standard voiceover lines. Jingles and sonic branding are standard for any business and often come with high-paying usage fees for more lucrative brands.
Beyond commercial voiceover opportunities, fiction, entertainment, and especially projects aimed at children can require singing characters. This is very typical for children’s educational and entertainment-based content. While singers will often have a head start in voice acting, voice actors don’t necessarily gain the ability to belt a tune in their training, and this makes real singers stand out amongst the competition.
Non-Singing Voiceover Work
If you choose to stretch beyond singing and utilise your vocal skills in other areas, the bulk of voiceover work can be split into four main categories.
Commercial
TV, radio, and social media are the big three. Commercials are everywhere, and as we spend more and more time looking at screens, voiceover has become an even bigger aspect of commercial success.
Advertisements are the most profitable type of voiceover. In the industry, voice actors will usually hold on to the rights to their voice recording and charge the client usage fees based on the project’s scope and the brand’s size. Find yourself recording a 30-second gig for Coca-Cola, and you’ve already hit the jackpot. Even better, if the client decides to extend the time they are displaying the ad, you’ll get paid more for no extra work.
Character
While character voice acting is not as lucrative, it’s the most creatively fulfilling, making this industry sector particularly competitive – Who doesn’t want to voice the hero in a video game?
Character acting can be found in a range of mediums, from educational content to films, audio dramas to mobile games. Anime is likely the most competitive, as the voice actors are usually also super-fans of the medium itself. This is also the most important sector to have plenty of acting experience and a nice voice alone is unlikely to secure work without demonstrating clear acting ability.
Narration
What’s the difference between voiceover and narration, anyway?
Well, it’s difficult to completely differentiate the two. Voiceover is considered a tool for providing information or dialogue, while narration is a storytelling technique. The biggest mediums for narration are documentaries and audiobooks, both of which require the narrator to guide the audience through the story, whether they are a character in it or not.
Narration requires a voice that audiences would listen to over a long period of time, and the work itself requires long reads, consistency, and incredible pacing to keep the listener engaged.
Business
Corporate videos, IVR and explainers might not sound like the most exciting sector of the voiceover industry, but a fair amount of the work falls into this category. This includes automatic telephone calls, business-to-business and business-to-customer content and training.
The key to finding voiceover work in the business world is found in a voice actor’s ability to represent a brand with their voice. Professional, clear and authoritative tones are likely to be chosen as they best communicate important information, statistics and advice.
Brands also like to stick to one brand voice so customers, clients and internal employees recognise it as part of a sonic branding strategy, which gives voice actors an excellent opportunity for repeat work.
How to Start Voice Acting
There are various steps you can take to kickstart your voiceover career.
Voice Reels & Demo Samples
You can’t book a voiceover gig if clients can’t hear your voice. It sounds simple enough, but many newbie voice actors ignore the importance of their professional samples and what to include in a voice reel. While your reel is a compilation of voiceover work so clients can get a feel for your vocal ability and versatility, individual voice samples are used to be more accurate to what the client is looking for.
What should you put in your voice reel? The key to casting success is a high-quality voice reel with expertly placed transitions and a variety of scripts displaying the full range of vocal tones in your repertoire – It’s an investment in your own career.
Some clients and platforms will require auditions with a specific script, while some sites allow you to upload your demos so casting directors can find you. Exploring the various voiceover platforms is important, and there should be no exclusivity other than with voiceover agents.
Voice Coaching & Training
For beginner voice actors, training is a crucial step.
As a singer, you’ll have a head start with your vocal abilities and control, but pacing and industry knowledge is just as important. Being able to read a script is one thing, but understanding how a script should be read is another, and some projects are more complex than the standard, such as dubbing.
Vocal skills are essential, but audio skills are also desired. Setting up your own home studio can give a serious boost to your voiceover career. This will improve your turnaround time and reduce the costs of studio booking for you and your clients, but it will require some research and budget.
A great voiceover coach can supercharge this learning curve.
Consultations
Consultations are a great way to dip your toe in the water and discover all the necessary steps to becoming a voice actor through expert knowledge and guidance.
Voicereels.com, as well as helping with your reels and demo samples, offer a free consultation for aspiring voice actors as well as other free resources like their royalty-free script library for practice and demo recording. This is a great way to shake off any worries about branching out into a new industry and get answers from experts with casting experience – There’s no need to wing it.
Conclusion
Voice acting presents an exciting avenue for singers to utilise their existing skills, diversify their income streams, and expand their artistic horizons.
Singers possess the ability to convey a wide range of emotions through their voices, just as they do through their songs. The skills developed through a singing career, such as characterization, vocal versatility, and technical proficiency, seamlessly translate into the world of voiceover, and this gives YOU a head start.
Take your first steps to voiceover stardom today, and give voice acting a try!
