Post by Laurence Stirling Knott

I feel obligated to share this video by Matt Godfrey because he is SO right! VO/VA and narrator friends, take note! Huge thanks to Krissy Barnes for bringing it to my attention by sharing it in the Leonardo Audio Narrator Community on Facebook. When I started VO I thought "eh, my voice is meh, I kinda really wish I sounded like so and so, or so and so" but over the course of the last 10 months or so, I've learnt that actually I really like my voice and what I can do with it, and that to embrace your voice allows you to more often make stronger choices and bolder decisions with conviction – because you're not doubting how YOU sound naturally. And, you realise just how much there is to like about your voice. Plus, ultimately, not everyone is going to like your voice anyway so it's not worth adding yourself to that list of people! That's the worst person of the lot to add to that list! It's more difficult to convince others of the authenticity of your performance if you're criticising yourself the entire time, especially during a performance and especially when it's something natural about yourself. Embrace yourself. Be cool with yourself. Because you ARE cool. Every single narrator in the world, every single PERSON in the world is cool in their own way (though that changes by perspective haha, you can't please everybody). And you gotta embrace yourself and know you're cool to be cool. To add to this, when I first listened to one of my favourite narrators – Fred Berman – I thought "man, he has kind of a weird voice, I'm not sure I'm gonna jive with this?" But I stuck with it and ended up listening to multiple books narrated by him back to back one after the other because I loved his performance that much. And now whenever I hear him narrate anything I'm instantly transported to that place and immersed in the story. I just love his character work. So tl;dr "weird voices" are freaking great! That's a unique vocal fingerprint! Matt is running his first narration workout with Leonardo Audio at 6:45pm Eastern Time on 3rd November, and I can't wait to work with him. The Leonardo audio workouts are fantastic value for money and chances to get direction and feedback from industry pros with countless titles under their belts, so I cannot recommend them enough to any and all my fellow narrators out there. Get in there, get narrating (or auditing), and get on track! https://lnkd.in/eRinRFyE And just to clarify, I've not been sponsored or anything to say any of this. I am just a frequent participant in Leonardo Audio's workshops because I get so much value out of them and I really want my fellow narrators out there to get that value too. Wouldn't be on the track I'm on with the goals I have – and plans to achieve those goals – without them.

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