Ask Lemmy

Generic voices are a necessity too. They provide contrast to good voices and are great at adding without taking away from a point or scene. I.E. generic guy says "commander we have a problem" Commander then gets to say his cool line with awesome tone. Or generic background talk that you don't want people to focus on. Like people chatting in a restaurant you want to be homogeneous so that Morgan Freeman's voice is what you focus on.

Plenty of good reasons to want basic voice actors, though most anyone can also fill that roll, so probably hard to be a professional generic voice lol

I'm an actor- mostly theatre. I've VO'd a handful of TV commercials. I am not a successful voice actor. It requires as much dedication, training, equipment etc as any career.

I would recommend two things.

1. voice classes and books in the tradition of Cecily Berry. You'll also want to look into some phonetics/IPA work as well. People will expect you to know - for e.g. how and why a southern accent diphthongizes the vowels and which vowels it shares with GenAm vs RP.

2. music / sound production. You may be expected to do your own noise removal, normalization, amplificiation and limiting.

Generic like most main characters in anime? Why not?

I've been told a lot that I have a great voice and that I should be in the radio many times as an adult. I've never actually considered it because I hate hearing the sound of my own voice, and I assume people are just being nice.

I've tried (amateur) voice acting, and I sound stilted and over-emphasising.

Why not? Norm Macdonald had a career in show business and he had the blandest monotone voice ever. People tell me I sound just like him

I mean a lot of voice actors get gigs just doing weird sounds

Have you seen the VA opportunities for "Additional Voices" in the credits? Many people make a living in that non-marquee space and it has huge demand. The one trick is to learn how to emote or learn to sing. Simply sounding generic does no one any good if the voice is flat and unemotive. A voice has to convey emotion - how it sounds doing it will define how much work you get.

Will I be paid appropriately? If yes, then yes.

It would have to pay more than my current job.

I've voice acted for some fan material and many people wish it sounded more generic, though nobody has complained that it was technically bad.

I once heard a lady respond to a claim that she should be doing voice acting. Basically she's a show host and presenter, so she should know fairly much about the field and is already pretty trained for voice stuff.

And basically, she said that she couldn't do that (I assume professionally), because you essentially need voice training which takes 1-2 years. Presumably that's not a full-time training, and rather just regular feedback from a trainer + you training in your own time, but yeah, still sounds rather involved.

I'm guessing, though, there's also a big difference between voice acting for a series, where you need to speak longer sentences correctly in the right tempo with appropriate emotion,
and just one-off gigs like a radio ad for a local company.

Why not? You'd make a perfect extra

Depends on the gig, but yeah, probably.