The character voice checklist

Laban Efforts
Dabbing - (Sudden, direct & light)
Flicking - (Sudden, indirect & light)
Pressing - (Sustained, direct & strong)
Thrusting - (Sudden, direct & strong)
Gliding - (Sustained, direct & light)
Floating - (Sustained, indirect & light)
Wringing - (Sustained, indirect & strong)
Slashing - (Sudden, indirect & strong)

Voice placement
Nasal - (Like the Aussie accent)
Throaty - (Like Kermit the frog or Jordan Peterson)
Mixed - (regular)

Air Quality
Breathy
Dry

Age range
Young
Middle-aged
Old

Gender
Male
Female
Other/Non-binary

Size
Small 
Medium
Large

Tempo
Slow 
Medium 
Fast

Volume
Quiet 
Mid 
Loud

Tone/Attitude
Friendly 
Impartial 
Aggressive

Accents 
Too many to write down - Take your pick!

Vocal Issues
Sore throat
Lisp
Stutter/stammer
Mumbler ​

Hello again, and welcome back to improve your voice. My name is Darren McStay and today I'm going to show you how you can create 100 distinctly different voices. I know it sounds crazy, but anybody can do it. I swear to you. And by the end of this video, you're going to understand completely how easy it is. This is a big one folks. So get comfortable because I'm going to blow your socks off. So if you're here for this video, I'm guessing that you're one of three people. You're either an old pro currently stuck for ideas and looking for inspiration. The newbie who's completely clueless or someone who just stumbled across the video and so happens to be curious about how it all works. Either way welcome. We're going to be playing with our voices today. So I hope you're prepared and warmed up. If you're not, I suggest going away and doing a warm up first because we're going to be using our voices today.

And I want to make sure that you're ready and limber to go. If you don't have any warmups, check this video out here, go away, do that, come back and watch this video. And of course, if you can't be asked then fine, let's carry on. So as promised, I'm going to show you how you can make hundred completely different distinctive voices. Not only that, but these one hundred voices should be completely unrecognizable from each other. That's a bold statement, right? But you're going to see why soon. Are you ready to get started? I don't like to mess around, so let's just get into it. How can you make a hundred different voices? First? We'll need a pen and paper. So pause this video, go grab one or get notes up on your phone because we are going to write a checklist together. So the first thing I do when developing a voice for a character is I look at something that's called LABAN efforts.

LABAN comes from the name Rudolph Laban. I'm not going to go into who he was right now, but if you want to know more about him and his work, then there's a link in the description box below. But in a nutshell, he was a movement teacher who developed a system of working to be able to describe the action that was being made, which acted as a vocabulary between himself and dancers and later actors. So basically a way of communicating what you wanted them to physically do. I use his efforts as a way to change up the characteristics of the voice I'm creating. So you need to use your imagination a bit. Now, why is this useful for the voice? Well, when we start out developing a character or a bunch of characters, it can be difficult sometimes to really separate them apart from each other.

And we can get lost without a checklist to kind of make sure that they are very different from each other and they stand out and it doesn't always sound like you. So this list is the first port of call I'd go to, to make sure that they're distinctly different. Now there's eight of these efforts. So automatically by following each one, you've got the possibility of doing eight different voices. So let's talk about what they are. You could think of these as physical traits. You could think of these as emotional traits. However, they inspire you, and however, accurately you are able to make them will give you distinct differences already. So if we consider different elements of the voice to be light or strong, then this is the weight of the voice. And if we think of it as being direct or indirect, this is the spatial quality.

And lastly, we think of it as being sudden or sustained. Then this is the timing. By taking the two different weights, the two different timings and the two different spatial qualities. We have six things to think about and combining one with the other, with the other in different variation gives us eight different outcomes. I know it sounds a bit tricky right now, but don't worry. It's going to get easier. So the type of voices we could have is a dabbing voice, a flicking voice, a pressing voice, a thrusting voice, a wringing voice, a slashing voice, a gliding voice, and a floating voice. You can see these as sort of textures and they already have their own character to them. So dabbing is light direct, and sudden. Dabbing is almost like the way Tony Blair used to speak. He'd always punctuate certain vowels, always looking forward, always going forward, but it's short, sharp, sudden words.

He chops them up and pushes them out one by one as if he's poking as he's speaking. So that's dabbing that gives you one characteristic. You may do it slightly differently, but you get the idea. The next one would be flicking and that's similar to dabbing, but it's less direct. So rather than being on the button, it's a bit more flippant and thrown around. A bit less focused than the dabbing. It's a bit more all over the place, still light, but a bit, less directional. And we consider something like that to be flicking. Again, you can

make your own version up. Next we can have pressing, which is strong, sustained and direct. If you are speaking directly and sustained and strong. Notice, I've not really changed my accent throughout these, I'm still just speaking really in my own dialect. Let's try floating now.

So floating is light sustained, but indirect. It could be all over and doesn't really know where it's going. It's so, so sustained, light and indirect. And a little floaty. Does that make sense? We should be starting to see some strong differences now. So that's four out of eight possible efforts you could put in when creating your character voice. I know you want to get to this yourself and you don't want to be watching me all day so you can try the other four for yourself and just see how precise you can be getting one different to the next, have a play with it. See what you can come up with. I've written these down in the description box below, and there's also a PDF on my website. Now, after those eight efforts and eight different types of voice, we can now add one of three things in.

Are they nasally? Do they speak up here in their nose or are they throaty speaking down here in the throat? Is that where they're speaking from? Or are they speaking regularly with enough with air coming out of the throat and the nose together? There's three options. If you divide those three by eight, you've now got 24 different options to play with. You see where this is going. These are just ideas. This is fuel for when you get stuck. Okay, well, we've got 24 possible voices we can do. Now. Let's keep going. I need to find something to read for you. I was a bit unprepared. Okay. I've got something. So let's say that nasally might sound like this. "These strings are known for that bold, extra bright tone". And maybe throaty. "These strings

are known for their

bold, extra bright tone". And then maybe normal. "These strings are known for their bold, extra bright tone". Look, three different voices. And if we start adding in some of the elements from before, maybe I have throaty and floaty,

[inaudible]

Already with a very different one to nasally and Dabby. For example, "These strings are known for their bold and extra bright tone". See, look two very different voices. You can put all those eight with all those three and we have 24 voices play with it. Find out for yourself. It's going to be fun. Next. We can also now consider two other elements are very breathy or dry. Two other different variations. So if we have 24 different types of voices, we now have two extra options to add in. So that's 48 voices already. You've got 48 options you can play with. I told you, you could do it. Didn't I, but there's more because it doesn't stop there. I want you now to consider their age range. Are they young middle-aged or old? You can break this down as you want, but are they a child, adult or old person? And this is without practicing. I'm just going to try. I know I'm not going to sound like a child because I've got a fairly deep voice. I can use me trying to sound like a child as a type of voice, whether it sounds like a child or not. "These strings are known for their bold, extra bright tone". Then an adult would be like my voice, '"these strings are known for their bold, extra bright tone". There may be an old voice

"These strings are known for that bold, extra bright tone."

Again, three different possibilities of the way you can do it. So we were up to 48, right? Times three, because we've got a new three possibilities. That's already 144 different voices you can create from what I've shown you already. But it doesn't stop there. There's more. I said there was gonna be a hundred. I lied. I'm sorry. There's actually a lot more you can do, but now well let's consider this? Are they male or female? I'm not saying that you can sound like a female or you can sound like a male. I'm saying you can do your version of each one. And it just gives you more characteristics. "These strings are known for their bold, extra bright tone". Maybe that's my version of a woman. I know it's terrible. It doesn't sound like a woman, but different to the way I'm going to do it because I'm going to do it like a man.

"These strings are known for their bold, extra bright tone". I know they're not brilliant, but at least they're clearly different from each other. With those two options, we now have 288 different character voices we can create. And it still doesn't stop there. There's more really? Yes, let's consider this. Are they small? Are

they medium? Are they large? Maybe if you were doing the voice of a mouse, it will be quite small. And if you're doing an elephant, it would be quite big or maybe vice versa. If you wanted to play around with those roles and maybe medium would be human or bear or shark or something in the middle, there's no strict rule for that. But there's three different things you can think about. Maybe if it was small and might speak like this and maybe [inaudible] crunch, it might speak like this. You see what I mean?

So 288 opportunities for voices, times another three, small, medium, or large that's 864 different voices. You have no excuses at this point, not to do at least five different voices, 864. You have the possibility to do right. But there is more, there is absolutely more. Can you believe it? I'm getting excited. Now this is crazy. Yes, there is absolutely more because we haven't talked about tempo. Are they speaking slow? Are they speaking medium? Are they speaking fast? Are they battling off words as quick as can be [inaudible] or do they have a regular pace? Somewhere in the middle? See three different ways tempos. So right. We've got 864 times three new ideas. That's 2592 opportunities to create a character voice. And it doesn't stop there because seriously, more things you can do. I know, I know it's mental. I said a hundred. You're getting more than I bargained for. Are they quiet? Do they speak a medium volume?

There's something to think about. There's another three things. Times three that's 7,776 options you can have. And what's next? Well tone attitude. What is their attitude? What, what are they like? Are they friendly? "How's it going, did you have a nice day today? Oh, it's lovely to see you". Are they impartial or are they, you know, whatever? "Hi. Yeah, it was nice to see you" or are they aggressive? That gives 3 completely different tonalities to the voice. So we times that by three, and this is the number we get. Yep. 23,328 character voice possibilities. You can create starting right now. No more excuses. I said a hundred and you should easily be able to crack a hundred voices because the options are that high. And that is really without even adding in accents. What if we picked 10 accents, American, California, American Southern American, New York, Irish, Scottish RP, Cockney, Indian, Nigerian, south African. That's 10.

So we could times that by 10, we've got 233,280 possibilities. Then there's more to think about. Maybe they've got a little lisp, maybe they're hard of hearing or the sobs about a different way. It's also reasonably possible that there are so many W's, there's already three more things to think about times three. Look, I'm not going to go any than this because we now have 699,840 different character voices that you can produce. You only need a hundred. You don't even need that. You know, if you're a voiceover actor, you might even do maximum of 20 in your life because people generally get you in for your own voice. But if you can master a hundred accents, which are distinctly different, you'll be working for the rest of your life. But all this knowledge and all this information and all these possibilities that are there for you as a voiceover artist, creating characters as someone who wants to be professional, it's all useless

unless you learn to use your instrument to make those voices happen. Because if you have restrictions or things about your voice, that are really already distinctive, that you can't get rid of by choice, then that's gonna leave you behind the people who can. I know that's unfortunate for some people, but the muscles that make up the voice are like any other muscle and they can be trained. So knowing all this is one thing, but actually possessing the instrument that works for you because you keep it regularly. Exercised is another. And if you want to speak each one effectively and believably, you need to be doing daily work like the pros do. If you want your voice to change and you want to be able to manipulate it any way you want, you need to be working daily. And if you don't have the tools and you need the tools to be able to develop your voice into a flexible, useful instrument for you as a voice actor, as an actor, as a singer, DnD player or as a human in general, who needs to speak to others to create that resonant, articulate, powerful, flexible voice, which can create over half a million voices, distinctively different.

If that's something you want to do, if you have a burning desire, if you are serious about your voice and bettering it and seriously, get your ass over to my online course and start working on it today, I've got an eight week fully comprehensive online voice course, the exercises in which you need, if you want to progress to the next level. Okay? So get your down there now because you've got to get started today. If you want to be ahead of everyone else, if you don't know where to find my course, there's also a link in

the description box below. Thank you for joining me on this. I hope you've enjoyed it. I've really had fun doing it. My name's Darren McStay. This is improve your voice. That was how to create over half a million voices. Even though I said just a hundred. Thanks for joining me. I'll see you soon until the next time drink. Plenty of water. Get lots of sleep, go for walks in nature and take care of your voice. So yeah,