VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION…

Hello and welcome to Improve Your Voice. My name is Darren McStay, and today on this video I'm going to give you a 10 minute workout that you can do every day to practice and better enable your voice acting ability or just vocal ability in general. We are going to start with a sort of a brief physical warmup and then a more voice related warmup, and then some articulation exercises, some dexterity exercises. Then we're gonna read from a script, which is something we can do every day to improve our overall speaking ability. And we'll go through how that's gonna help you as a voice actor or in general as we go. If you are looking for more of this kind of work. There's plenty on the channel, but also I do have online courses, which go into great detail and you have access to me through those courses as well.

So they're worth checking out. There's links in the description box below. I'm gonna keep this easy. I'm not gonna do a full body warmup because I've got plenty. And here's one good one right there if you want to do that. And I do recommend occasionally doing the, a full body warmup because your body is your instrument and your voice is connected to your body. So it's not a bad idea to, to have it all limber and ready to go when you're using your voice, especially as an exercise, especially as a warmup, and especially for practice. I'm going to do what I can from this seat. So I'm gonna start by moving my spine around in circles. If you keep your, you know, hips are sitting, right, so they're in the same spot. And try and keep your shoulders in the same spot, but move just the middle of your spine.

You can arch back, arch forward, lean forward. Just get it moving. That's the idea. 'cause The spine wants to move, it wants to be limber and that helps and feeds everything else in your body. So by keeping the spine as the first and probably main thing something that's flexible, it's a good place to start, especially if you're sitting down. And then I'd go for the shoulders next. So we can do some rolls back like this. You can do 'em individually, we can do 'em together. So you're just taking the shoulder and it's full, you know how far forward it can go, how far back it can go without pushing too much. And then of course you can go the other way.

It's actually quite pleasant already. And then we can think about the neck. So if we drop our head down and can just roll it to the side, I don't want you to go any further than that 'cause it can get a bit icky around the back if you're not, if you've got any issues with your neck or if you don't want any issues with your neck, perhaps not going any further than the side is a good idea for now. And then what we can do is take one arm over placing our, a hand on our ear and just without pulling or pushing, we can just allow the weight of that arm and that hand to give a little stretch on the side. And we can take the other arm and put it out. And then you can start feeling that all the way up your arm into your neck, into your head. If you breathe in and let go on your out breath, o like a sigh, not too much. We can roll back around to the other side and do the same arm over. No pushing, no pulling. Just allow the weight of the arm to do the work. And then we take this arm, put it straight out. If you 0.1 of your fingers, maybe this middle one, you might feel a different stretch.

Okay, since this is a short video, I'm not gonna take too much time on it. We can also have the same idea, but having our head forward, placing the hands on your head, but not pulling, just allowing the weight to offer the stretch. And again, it's on the outbreath, we really let go and really allow that lengthening to take place. Okay, so that's a brief little physical warmup from your seat that you can do. What else you could do is also maybe perhaps 'cause we're gonna start warming up the, the the, the mouth, the voice and the articulators is you can actually give a little massage around your jaw. So if you follow your teeth through your cheeks around to where the teeth meet the bottom and the top meet, there's a muscle in there. And this is a muscle that often doesn't get enough attention.

It's really worth giving it a little massage from time to time because it can get very sore. It can get very tight. And this can really affect your articulation, how well you're able to open and close your mouth, and how easy that is. A lot of people like myself who tend to mumble, you'd find that by, if this jaw muscles a little more limber, your jaw would open and close much easier. And therefore you might find it easier to articulate yourself clearer. Also you can massage underneath, underneath the jaw here. I find this a little painful. I've got some tension there. You see? And round the back of the head, find any spots in your head, neck and shoulders that you feel might be a little bit tense and give 'em a little work. Just give 'em a

little bit of attention. Again, we're gonna move on, but you can take it as as long as you like with these things. And of course, if you have time for a full body warmup, it's always worth doing. Now we're gonna start warming up the voice. Now I'm gonna start by yawning.

I don't wanna push or make too much noise on the way out, but do make some, have that feeling of a sigh. Letting go. Ugh. Let the body flop. Just let it, everything ugh, come out in its own way. Something else that happens. You can start mm, widening our mouth and just mm, allowing little movements in our neck and our mouth to sort of open up and awaken and stretch a little bit. Now we could try that yawn again, but with our mouth closed mm, you start really working and feeling that, that what's happening on the inside and the space you're creating.

And now I'll be getting into a hum. So I want to sort of utilize that sigh feeling, but on a hum Hmm. I say the si feeling. 'cause I don't want you to push. Also try, if you can, not to copy my tone, I'm just finding what tone is natural for me and my voice. Mm. But it feels even I'm, I feel like I'm forcing it a little bit. Mm. That feels more natural. Mm. But if you take more air, hmm, it's gonna come out at a faster pace. So you might find that the vocal folds move faster and therefore the pitch goes higher. Mm.

And if you slow it down, you could lose your voice. You could go completely but you can hear the vocal folds slow, slow down. So therefore you get a lower tone if you like a lower note. So that's something you can do a little warmups. And from there, from the humming, we can start playing, going up and down the scale. Remember to breathe, it's very important to breathe. You need to breathe, breathe. And then actually going from that hum up and down you start going into sirening, which is really where it goes into the nose. More what you find is the tongue blocks off the top and allows those vibrations to go up into your nasal cavity. Mmm.

It's useful to imagine that you're actually going into your head. Mmm. Or above your head. Mmm. And then down into your chest or your belly. So if you consider, like use your imagination to think that the voice is going lower than it is and higher than it is, and these vibrations are traveling to those places, you'd probably be able to get further with it. But also you're kind of ensuring that you're giving yourself a good range of movement in that warmup. And, and considering different parts of your voice, you might not usually again, explore, play with it. As always, you need to have a playful attitude when you're a voice actor or when you're using your voice and, and improving, that's gonna stop you from judging yourself. And you're just gonna be, yeah, have more fun and you'll discover things and you become just a better speaker in general, I find. So now we've done the, a bit of the body warmup and we've done some of the voice warmup. We can do a more dedicated articulation warmup. And one of the main articulators is the tongue. So we're gonna start with a tongue tri. If you can't do a tongue tri, there's a video here that's gonna help you do that.

If you think of the first two words of drill and just hold on the r again, you can go up and down with this, the same you did with the humming. And we can do the same again with our lips. If you're someone who finds it difficult to do the lips, you can put your fingers in the soft part of your cheeks here like this until you find it. And then we can put the two together. Yeah. And so what I'm gonna do here is now we've done a little articulation warmup is to do a dexterity exercise or two dexterity exercises. Actually, this is something a lot of people here are quite fond of. And so <laugh>, I'm, I'm gonna do it again 'cause it really works. And the first one is Barga baraga, port Begue. And what we do, we repeat that on one breath as many times as we can and get faster and faster as we go. Barga port, I'm outta practice with this.

So yeah, <laugh>, you can start getting faster. And some people say, especially speech therapists, that tongue twisters don't, don't do anything. But they, they, they do, they <laugh> help your brain and your body connect to sounds and words in a, in a way that when you start using other words and sounds, you're just better able to connect and put these things together. And it's dexterity, right? It's like nimbleness. It's the ability to be able to do something and you don't get there without practice. So these kind of exercises are really good and tongue twisters too, at helping you prepare those muscles. And it's practice. This is exercise. This is what you do in the, in the day and before you go off to work or before you go off to

speak to, to ready yourself. And this is why this short 10 minute video should be quite useful for anyone daily to do. The other one of these is very similar, but it's, man, this one's tough, man.

I need some practice. But you get the idea. And for this whole video, I'm gonna have a transcription and a printout on my website, which you can follow in a link below. Okay? So you go there and you can have this set out. So you can just look at it every day. Which brings me on to the next thing, which is actually speaking text. If you're a voice actor, speaking text is what you are about. It's what you're gonna do. And the particular text that I'm gonna show you is called Arthur of the Rat. You may have heard it here before, you may have heard it from somewhere else, but it's a text that covers all the English phonetics in one in one kind of short story. And so you are covering all your bases by reading this. And if you are able to, I'd suggest that you record yourself. Where's my phone? Hold on.

I recommend that you record yourself doing this and listen back not to the quality of your voice. 'cause These things aren't gonna give you a good quality and you're gonna hate yourself. Oh, my voice sounds so tanny. It's horrible. Don't worry about it. What you wanna listen to is how well you pronounce the words and how clear you think you are. And it's not really to do with your accent, it's more to do with your annunciation of, of, because I have an accent. Okay? I have quite a strong accent. Well, it's probably more diluted these days than it used to be when I grew up. But I'm from East London, Essex, and there were a lot of people from, you know, the fifties and sixties move out, moved out to the area I grew up, and a lot of them were cockney. And so that really influenced my accent as a child.

And obviously my mum was Irish, so I had a bit of a blend and I've got a unique accent in that respect. You can kind of place it, but it's also a bit here and there. But what I, by doing these, these exercises, you can keep your accent and still be audible and still be clear and still be able to articulate yourself and the words you speak in a way that everyone can understand. And you don't have to lose your identity by doing that. A lot of people think that if you don't sound eng like posh English or RP received pronunciation, which is that made up English accent, which you probably hear on all the period drums. It's, it's, it's, it's a bit lifeless, I find, and it, it doesn't really have much to it and it doesn't have any character in my opinion. So I prefer to keep my own accent. I don't think by speaking an rp it necessarily gives you a good voice. It just, it's just a neutral way of sounding. It's like news rate reader looks, right? So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna get this text, it's called Arthur of the Rat. And again, you'll find this on my website on the link, same link below. And I'm gonna read through it and record.

I'll do it once for you now so we can have a listen back. Here we go. There was once a young rats named Arthur, who could never take the trouble to make up his mind. Whenever his friends asked him if he would like to go out with them. He would only answer a no, he wouldn't say yes, and he wouldn't say no either. He could never learn to make a choice. His Aunt Helen said to him, no one will ever care for you if you carry on like this. You have no more mind than a blade of grass. Arthur looked wise, but stupidly said nothing. One rainy day, the rats heard a great noise in the loft where they lived. The pine rafters were all rotten in the middle. And at last, one of the joists had given way and fallen to the ground.

The walls shook, and all the rat's hair stood on end with fear and horror. This won't do, said the old rat who was chief. I'll send out scouts to search for a new home. I'm not gonna go through the whole text, I'll stop there. But I am not necessarily looking for too much in the storytelling. I feel I understand this story enough. I've heard it many times, but I, I am interested in critiquing myself over the, the choices I make with the other voices. I have my narration voice. I've got different character voices and that they're, they're kind of for me, they're my go-tos and I try to keep them within the same accent, but just give them different textures. And if you want a video that really covers that stuff, this is the one for you there that's gonna help you create different voices and hopefully make them very distinct. So as a voice actor, I like to see, listen back and check out how distinctly differently they sound. Or does it all sound like me too much? Here we go.

There was once a young rats named Arthur, who could never take the trouble to make up his mind. Whenever his friends asked him if he would like to go out with them, he would only answer a nah, he wouldn't say yes, and he wouldn't say no either. He could never learn to make a choice. His aunt hella.

So, I mean, that's clear enough. I mean, I have two kids, so I'm able to read stories to them every night and we get quite elaborate and we I even make some up sometimes, and I just, just, just so I can have a play with different sounds and different voices, different characters, different accents. I make accents up. I just allow myself to flow. But trouble is when you do that, you, you start, there's no consistency to it. And so that's something that I'm working on. But for you, it depe it might be your articulation, it might be the pacing, the speed of your delivery. It could be anything. It might even just be your, you, you might mumble or, or over articulate. And so by listening back, you're gonna be able to critique yourself. That's how you're gonna grow. So this video we've covered a basic physical warmup from the upper body upwards, the voice warmup some articulation, warmup and dexterity exercises and this text.

And then by recording it, listening back, you're gonna see improvements, you're gonna hear what you want to change, and you are going to start changing it and you're going to get better. So I really hope this is useful for you. Very short. Again, visit my website if you'd like to get the transcription and, and all the exercises from this video. And also if you want to go deeper and really improve your voice and have a dedicated set of exercises daily for months at a time, then I have courses that are available to you also through the website. Thank you so much for watching. My name's Darren McStay. This is Improve Your Voice. And until the next time