Character Voiceover Tip: Build a library

Prepare your character stable!

One of the most important things you can do to increase your capabilities is to actually document what you already know and build a character library.

Your character library will be your rolodex of voices that you can “turn on” immediately and be the go to resource when you need to create a character quickly e.g. an Audition!

Creating your character library is a great way of establishing what your voice can do, what you are comfortable doing and where your true talents lie. When I talk about documenting the library I mean exactly that, write it down! The way I created my library was to turn my phone on to record and work my way around the globe doing all the different characters I knew I did from each region. Once I had that recording, I listened back writing down every voice, giving the character a name, an ideal genre and some basics notes. Any voice that didn’t sound “real” got resigned to the bin so that I only had the best of my best written down. You should also include any “bad” celebrity impressions you do as a bad impression is, after all, another character voice so it’s worth having it to hand just in case!

By having this library and becoming familiar with it you prepare yourself for that moment either in a session or an audition where “just try this character” is sprung on you and you have to come up with a voice immediately. Usually within your character library there will be someone close or you can mix a few together to get something close quickly. This is also a great way of establishing a “stable” of characters from which you can grow and expand your repertoire!

Check out the video below for more on this topic!