The Mic Guy: Adventures in Voiceover

I just got home from the first portion of a two-day course at Voicetrax entitled “The Colors of Your Voice.”

It’s a system of vocal technique developed by voice artist Thom Pinto (announcer for The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and promo voice of San Francisco’s KRON-TV), designed to help the voice actor find a quick, easily identifiable path into a read. I had the privilege of working with Thom one day last summer, and even though he’s not teaching this session personally, I’ve been looking forward to delving into his approach.

Thom’s system categorizes the voice’s various emotional tones into colors. (You can hear Thom demonstrate the concept via a series of demos on his site — demos that I’ve been reviewing in heavy rotation over the past several days.) In tonight’s class, we covered five elements of the vocal spectrum:

• Green, a natural, breezy conversational tone.
• Red, the voice of robust enthusiasm.
• Brown, which –as one might guess — is earthy.
• Pink, an airy and dreamlike quality.
• Orange, the sound of warmth and encouragement.

Not surprisingly, my grasp of red, brown, and orange felt pretty solid from the get-go. (In my head, my brown sounds like Billy Vera. I modeled my orange on a slightly understated John Leader, the familiar friendly voice of Disney animation trailers.) Also not surprisingly, my green needs a little work — my instincts are good, but I have to be wary of that strained edge that haunts my upper register. My pink actually wasn’t bad… but then, I’m comfortably in touch with my feminine side.

About half of my classmates this weekend are familiar faces. It’s always a kick to work with people I’ve been in classes with before, and hear how far they’ve progressed since I last saw them.

More color tomorrow.

This entry was posted on February 6, 2009 at 11:28 PM and is filed under Voice acting, Voiceover, Voicetrax. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.