What does a professional voice over artist actually do? (Hint: reading is the easy part)
There’s a phrase every voice artist has heard at some dinner party: “So basically, you get paid to read”. And yes, technically I do get paid to read, the same way a surgeon gets paid to cut. The difference lies in everything that happens before, during and after the reading. Today I’m opening the studio door so you can see exactly what you’re buying when you hire a professional voice.
A voice artist performs (not recites)
Your corporate video script can be read a thousand ways, and nine hundred and ninety-nine of them are wrong. Serious or warm? Enthusiastic or restrained? At what pace? Which word carries the message? My job is to find reading number one thousand: the one that makes your message sound like what your brand meant to say. That’s called performing, and it resembles reading about as much as cooking resembles owning ingredients.
A voice artist measures time like a watchmaker
Twenty seconds of radio spot are twenty seconds. Not twenty-one. A professional knows how many words fit each format, where to trim when the script arrives overweight, and how to win back a second without showing the seams. In Spanish we voice around 150 words per minute on average: that arithmetic comes built in, and I apply it to your quote before we record a single second.
A voice artist catches typos (for free)
Your script will pass through my eyes before it passes through my voice, and those eyes have been reading other people’s texts for twenty years. I spot the typo, the sentence that ties itself in knots, the figure that doesn’t add up and the word that works on paper but sounds like something else entirely when spoken. That quality control never shows up on the invoice, but it’s one of the most valuable things you take home.
A voice artist owns a studio (and knows how to use it)
The voice arrives wrapped in engineering: a condenser microphone, a treated booth, a sound chain that turns a good performance into a flawless audio file, edited, clean, and in the exact format your editor, your platform or your phone system needs. When you hire a professional with their own studio, you’re hiring the voice and the sound. Two for one.
A voice artist advises you
Is this script too long? Will this word land? Does this tone suit your brand? Ask. We voice artists have heard thousands of scripts and we know what works and what crashes. My favourite part of the job is when a client lets me pitch an alternative and the piece levels up. That doesn’t cost extra: it costs trust.
And what a voice artist does NOT do
To be fair: I don’t compose the music, I don’t edit your video (though I deliver audio your editor will enjoy working with) and I don’t perform miracles on scripts that want to tell your company’s entire history since 1953 in twenty seconds. Though that’s a story for another day.
Got a project that needs a voice? Now you know what’s in the pack. Write to me and you’ll have a quote within 24 hours. Reading, I promise, will be the easy part.