Invest in Your Voice
- glenn63work
- Apr 30
- 7 min read
An updated post by Glenn Hayden
I have updated my post on the importance of voice because, well......IT'S IMPORTANT.
Do not take your voice lightly, I beg you.
You've heard it before so believe it: An immensely important instrument of the actor is the voice. Having command over it WILL take your acting to the next level both on stage and on screen. A strong, flexible and open voice will lead you to more roles and — better still — a wider range of roles - and this will keep you employed when your hero or heroinne looks fade which, trust me, they will.
Voice is criminally ignored by many actors, especially those who are self-training or who started in film before having to project in a theatre. I have had occasions where an actor is perfect for a role but their voice fails them — and it is not my job, or any director's job on a professional gig, to train an actor's voice. Nobody has time for that indulgence - so they didn't get the gig. Acting is not talent alone. It is also technical mastery of your body. And your voice is a part of your body.
Your voice, movement and acting are not three separate fields. They make up an intertwined and complex organism working together to express the truth of the text, the character and the story. Everything we do comes back to our character's one prime objective — to be part of, and to tell, a STORY. Here is what happens when the voice is not serving that story.
If you carry tension — you cannot utilise your voice to tell story as effectively as you'd like to. Tension is the actor's silent enemy. It lives firstly in the jaw, the neck, the shoulders, the chest — and it strangleholds the voice before a word is spoken. A tense instrument cannot breathe freely, cannot resonate fully, cannot respond truthfully to the moment. The audience may not be able to name what they are hearing but they feel it and they turn off, or worse, they think you are a bad actor. Releasing tension is not a luxury warm-up activity. It is the first and most essential act of preparing to tell a story.
If you can't be heard in a theatre — no-one will hear your character's story. If thats the case, give the audience their money back. A voice that cannot fill the room — not through shouting but .through genuine supported projection — is asking the audience to do too much work. And audiences do not do that work. They disconnect. The story stops. Projection is not volume. It is the commitment of breath and intention through the body and out into the room. It is learnable. It is trainable. It is not optional.
If you cannot use and manipulate your voice on mic and on set — your screen performance could be one dimensional and bland. The microphone hears everything — the tension, the held breath, the uncontrolled resonance, the swallowed consonant. The screen asks for intimacy. Specificity. A voice that feels like it is thinking rather than performing. The actor who has genuine command over their voice can make the adjustment from theatre to film. The actor who has ignored it cannot.
If you lose energy at the ends of your sentences — you lose the energy of the scene and can disrupt the entire production. The end of the sentence is where the thought lands and the meaning completes. Drop the energy there and the story stops mid-sentence. Every time. Breathe through the thought. Commit to the end of every line as if the last word matters as much as the first. Because it does.
There are two ways and two ways only to develop your voice.
A strong daily practice and good technique.
Both are essential. Neither works without the other.
A Strong Daily Practice
The only way to improve your voice is to work on it. An actor is never truly out of work — if you're not on a paid gig, your maintenance should be your daily work. Building a voice routine you can utilise every day is not a huge ask of your time. If you've done voice workshops and you do not utlise what you've learned, you are undermining one of your greatest assets — you already know what to include. If you haven't yet bothered to learn about voice, there's no better time than now. Search for uncomplicated exercises you can genuinely adopt. Simple exercises done daily will be a great start until you find the resources to work with respected voice teachers.
The washroom is a perfect place to start your voice work each day. Private, great acoustics — and besides, what else are you going to do in there?
When I was an actor maintaining my voice, I used to hum constantly throughout my day — walking, reading, cooking — every opportunity to keep my voice warm, I took it. My body still automatically does this work. The car is also great for a rigorous warm up — socially isolated, free to make any sound you want. Public transport is trickier for exercises but perfect for breath work.
Before sleep and first thing in the morning is a great time for gentler work — it's good for the voice and a wonderful way to destress the body.
Commit to a daily practice and your body will find opportunities to do the work without you needing to think too much about instigating it.
Read your scripts aloud — not whispered and held back in your throat. Aloud. I am a great advocate that scripts are written to be heard, not kept silent in our heads. Reading aloud is a perfect opportunity to focus on clarity of thought, breathe through ideas, and work on articulation. Treat each sentence as an action — you are affecting someone, not just saying words. Don't worry about family and housemates. They'll probably enjoy the free show.
Your body in motion is a great way to free your voice. Get into the habit of using your voice in physical action — cleaning, the gym, walking, running — anything that requires your body, capitalise on it for your voice. The voice and the body are not separate instruments. They never were.
If you don't understand the importance of voice work, read more about it — don't just take my word for it. Look for quotes by established and respected actors. Read about voice. Google it. Do anything that will convince you that you must master your voice.
Vocal Technique.
Daily practice without good technique is like exercising with bad form — you adopt the wrong habits rather than correct them. The resources available to you are extraordinary and many of them are free online.
Get a group of actor friends together, pool your resources, buy the great voice texts and work through them together. Read the great vocal trainers — my training at WAAPA was primarily Cicely Berry and her work remains as relevant and rigorous as anything available today. Learn the mechanics of your voice — understand how breath, resonance and articulation work together, because that understanding will make every exercise more intelligent and more effective.
But do not only work solely in isolation. Your voice inside your head is completely different from the voice the world hears coming out of your body. You cannot hear yourself accurately without an expert ear in the room. Find the great voice teachers in your city — in Mumbai, track down Asif Ali Beg, one of the finest voice practitioners working in India today. If cost is a concern, get a group together and chip in for a single session. Split between six or more buddies, it becomes affordable. One session with the right teacher will give you more than months of uninformed solo work.
Vocal Health
Your voice is an instrument and instruments need maintenance. Overuse, illness, strain, screaming roles, and long runs of a play all take a toll. If you are not actively protecting the instrument you are shortening its life.
The most common mistake an actor makes when the voice is tired is to whisper. Don't. Whispering puts more strain on the vocal folds than normal speech. If the voice needs rest, the answer is silence.
Steam and hydrate...throughout the day. Avoiding caffeine, alcohol and dairy before a performance. These are basic maintenance plractices — not optional extras.
On film and television sets there is a particular temptation in high emotion scenes — shouting, crying, extreme physical exertion — to push through without protecting the instrument. The director could want multiple takes. The scene will be shot from several angles. An unhealthy voice will not survive that process. The actor who loses their voice on take three has let down the production and themselves.
Technical mastery means knowing how to access high emotion without destroying the instrument in the process.
The warm down gets far less attention than the warm up — but after a show, or shoot, or a long rehearsal the voice needs to come down as deliberately as it went up. Five to ten minutes of gentle humming, easy sirens and slow breath work is enough. Neglect this over a long run and you will feel it. If something feels consistently wrong — persistent hoarseness, pain, a voice that takes too long to warm up — see a laryngologist before it becomes something that cannot be fixed. Your voice is your livelihood. Treat it accordingly.
Hands Across the Sea: Voice Coaches Asif Ali Beg (India) and Patrick Klavins (Australia) talk to Rayana Pandey and Glenn Hayden
Your voice is not a given. It is a choice. Every actor who has built a significant career has understood this — not just in training but across the entire arc of a working life. The voice that serves you at twenty-five needs different care at forty-five and different attention again at sixty-five. It changes. It deepens. It reveals what you have lived — and if you have looked after it, it becomes more interesting rather than less. Train it. Maintain it. Protect it. Give it the daily attention it asks for and it will give you everything in return. Neglect it and it will quietly, incrementally, let you down at the moments that matter most.
Stella Adler said the actor has to work on their voice. She didn't say for a term, or for a season, or until the technique feels comfortable. She meant for as long as you call yourself an actor. Which is, I hope, for the rest of your life.
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