Givens About the Voiceover Coaching Industry

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It’s never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
Now, for our special guest.
Don Morrow: Okay. As a guy who’s been doing this for well over half a century, I have formed a few givens about the voiceover teaching industry or coaching industry, whatever you want to call it. One, most people who have been told they have a great voice don’t do anything about it but think a lot about it. Why? Because most people aren’t adventurous enough or gutsy enough to put their butts on the line. Now, that’s great for the working pros because the really great voices are not on the airwaves except maybe in air traffic control towers, airplanes, and heavy duty trucking. You want to hear trailer voices in a CB radio, no pun intended.
The next given, by the time somebody is ready to enter the fray, they’ve picked the voice to emulate. In other words, they’ve decided who they’re going to rip off and with that in mind, I invite my students to rip me off until they can think of somebody else and in time, they’ll develop their own style anyway. It’s like telling somebody who’s going to take up golf to go to a pro before they get into bad habits. Okay, professional DJs. Number three, they’re the hardest, the hardest people of all to train much tougher than a total novice and the reason, the longer they’ve been on the air, the tougher it is they get them out of what I call their comfort zone.
I train line by line and they’ll do fine until they read the whole spot by themselves and then they likely fall into the comfort zone again and the read that they’ve been doing for the last 20 or 30 years. You know, it’s like Aussie, Mel Gibson in Mad Max. I tell him, “Don’t forget how to do the old sound when a script calls for it, otherwise, that’s the only time.” Talk radio people for instance and news people are much easier to coach in voiceover than DJs.
A lot of people ask, how long is it going to take me to get a job? There’s no possible way you can give a truthful and straight answer on that. I gave a guy two lessons, recommended him to a major agent and he immediately landed a major television station promo contract at 175 grand a year. That’s the exception but it happened.
Here are some more givens to wrap this up. One, you have to absolutely be in love with the work. Two, you have to have great stamina to stick with it and three; you have to be able to handle rejection. All three or don’t waste your money on me or anybody else.
Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.
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