Do you do voices during your sessions? Any tips for someone trying expand their vocal repertoire?

Yes. Stop giving a fuck and just do the voices. They don't have to be good, but you will get good if you can be consistent.

From the North of England, playing with Americans and Canadians, if it helps they first thought I was Irish.

Do accents instead of funny voices. Check this out: accent.gmu.edu/browse.php
And keep practicing

Speaking has one very big similarity to singing:

You have to know how to carry your voice, and you find out how to do that by paying attention on how your voice resonates in your head.

If you do a deep voice, for example, your voice resonates deeper in your throat and more to the front where the larynx lies, while a high pitched voice will go to the back of your palate. Everything in between those two spots moves through your mouth, but always behind the teeth.

This comes in incredibly handy when doing impressions of accents, because a native speaker of one language doing another will also carry his voice in his "native" way and not in the fashion that his other language will.

Apart from this, switch up your larynx position and tongue placement. This drastically helps with a.) carrying your voice and b.) changing the overall resonance room of your mouth and throat.

Don't hold back, go completely overboard initially. You'll learn how to do the fine-tuning as you progress.

Also always do what , and say and keep practicing.

>Don't hold back, go completely overboard initially
Just be careful not to throw your voice out.

We aren't impersonating Brian Blessed, just how fucking overboard can you go?

>We aren't impersonating Brian Blessed

Then you're not trying hard enough

Is it any coincidence that there is a very large School for the Deaf right by Brian Blessed's childhood house?

Right, right! Forgot about that. I was thinking more about doing accents too broadly or voices going deeper as you want. It's mostly about really getting a feeling which muscle does what when moved a certain way and I believe you sort of need to overdo that bit to really understand what's going on.

Pure coincidence, as is the reinforced plexiglass and 3 block ban on glass bottles.

youtube.com/watch?v=tk4red1wpfE
This is sort of a career thing as well, but this is a nice primer on voice acting and stuff.

I don't, generally, I focus on a particular character's vocabulary and cadence more than trying to give them a bad faux Irish accent or whatever.

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Know when you're awful. Try not to be awful. If that's not possible, don't try. Remember, what your players like is different than a scale of good/bad.

Another thing I'd like to touch on (not that user) but it's also really important to know your vocal range. With practice you can certainly broaden it a bit, but it's also good to know where your limitations are. If you're mostly mid rangey or even higher pitched, it wouldn't be the best idea dipping low all the time and vocal frying the shit out of your speech half the time trying to force a manly character.

Learning what your actual voice sounds like, its range, etc are all extremely disheartening at first, but understand -everyone- goes through that. To this day I still don't like my voice, but I do what I must.

If I ever get to ST I'm going to do accents

>tfw forever a player

That's a good point. It's probably important to mention that when I say "carry your voice", I also mean to figure out a way to sound different in ways that feel comfortable to you, channelling your natural voice into a different persona rather than forcing it into a new shape that it's not made to assume. Work with your voice, not over it.

Now that we're not buried by quests, think we might see a resurgence of VA threads? Those were fun.

I would love that, too. But I don't think there will be - I saw a vocaroo thread the other day and it pretty much died after barely four posts of one-line posts, neither requesting nor offering lines.

The space taken up by Quest-threads doesn't mean other threads won't take their place and still blot out VA threads because VA threads are very, very slow by their very nature. They need people having scripts and they have to be up around the time that people reading and recording them.

I think that's mostly due to them dying out about a year ago, and so most people probably stopped looking for them for a good while. Myself included.

If we get a dedicated enough group on it constantly bumping and creating the threads, it may start slowly but I think it has potential. At least it doesn't have to get bumped every hour or die.

Yes I do, it's lots of fun and my players love it. Practice, silly.

Nah. My regular voice is already horrid enough, my "voices" would break any game.

Practice daily, have water on hand during game time, stay away from thick liquids like milk when making voices.