I meant to make a post talking about how important warm-ups are to voice acting back in May. But that didn’t happen. And honestly, it’s probably a good thing, because I have more to say about it now than I did then. My opinion on warm-ups hasn’t really changed. They’re super important to do, especially if you want to avoid injuries.

My Warm-ups

My warm-ups have changed a bit over time. Ultimately what I do for the warm-ups is get the body moving, get the air flowing, and get the tongue moving, then make sure the environment is good for recording. I start with setting up the office for recording. This involves laying down towels on the hardwood floor and making sure the blankets and such that I hang on the back of the doors and book shelves are where they’re supposed to be. Then moving the microphone into position. I usually do a little bit of stretching and toe touches while doing this.

After the room is set up, I have a couple of audio guides for stretching and warming up the facial muscles and throat (The Art of Voice Acting – Warm-up Exercises), this gets things moving and “wakes up” my voice. Then I do a few songs and tongue twisters to make sure everything is moving well and to challenge myself a little bit to work on odd sound combinations (Vocal Warm-ups – Youtube). And then finally I load up Reaper and record a small 5-10 minute sample text. I’m currently working on the short story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by Lewis Padgett recently. I then go through and edit the 5-10 minutes and listen for any audio issues (echo, background noise, mouth noises, lazy pronunciations, drifting character voices, etc). I make any adjustments I need to make, and am then ready for recording for the day.

All of this takes between 15 and 45 minutes from setting up to posting the warm-up bit on soundcloud. And the result is that the quality of my performance is much better than if I don’t do this. One of the biggest differences is that by the time I start recording for an audiobook, I’ve already relaxed a bit and become more expressive and engaging. It saves me having to go back and re-record the first bit of a chapter because it doesn’t flow as well as the rest of the chapter does.

Examples

Here are a couple of examples from auditions I submitted back in May. I recorded this first track without doing my warm-ups.

And this second track is the same script done later that day, after doing some proper warm-ups.

This is just an example of the difference in performance warming up makes. I am uploading my warm-up recordings to soundcloud recently. There are more examples of the rough cut that gets smoother as I go here.