After baby-babbling or reading aloud in class, barely any attention is paid to how we actually sound. There’s scant advice on improving our voice, let alone how to look after it. We learn how to speak simply by mimicking! Unless we take expensive lessons, rarely are we taught how to support our voices, how to sit and breathe properly, or how to read aloud convincingly.
In fact, sometimes we actually un-learn the natural techniques that we were born with!
And yet communication with the human voice is more prolific than at any other time in our evolution: thousands of TV and radio stations, millions of podcast episodes, more than a billion YouTube videos… plus millions more audio books, commercial voiceovers, e-learning commentaries and business-related videocalls.
This is the guide to help you become a stronger voice communicator on all of those channels so you can better compete with professional actors, or presenters on the likes of the BBC, ABC, or Gimlet.
It focusses specifically on your vocal image for audio and video channels (not stage presentations, business meetings, lectures or sermons) and with two main aims:
· To get you a better voice for audio and video channels.
· To show you how to read out loud convincingly and conversationally
You’ve invested in your look of choice, now invest in your voice.
Presented by Peter Stewart
Peter has been around voice and audio all his working life and has trained hundreds of broadcasters in all styles of radio from pop music stations such as Capital FM and BBC Radio 1 to Heart FM, the classical music station BBC Radio 3 and regional BBC stations. He’s trained news presenters on regional TV, the BBC News Channel and on flagship programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama. Other trainees have been music presenters, breakfast show hosts, travel news presenters and voice-over artists.
After leaving university with a degree in Communications, Peter went on to work at a number of radio stations as a news reader/journalist and then branching out into other presentation roles such as a music DJ, talk-show and phone-in host. His styles varied from the “fresh fun and exciting” news presentation at a commercial station, to more formal reads on the BBC. For several years he was heard on nationwide UK stations such as talkSPORT and Virgin Radio.
During this period, Peter was the winner of a prestigious New York Radio Award for his radio news presentations. He was the off-screen voice of the daily video news bulletins on Virgin Atlantic flights for several years, was co-host of the Telewest Cable show “Get A New Life” for three seasons, and was the voice for a series of radio commercials for a chain of electrical superstores.
Peter has studied on the “Voice for Performance” course with London’s prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and is also “Vocal Health First Aid” certified.
He has written a number of books on audio and video presentation and production (“Essential Radio Journalism”, “JournoLists”, two editions of “Essential Radio Skills” and three editions of “Broadcast Journalism”) and has written on voice and presentation skills in the BBC’s in-house newspaper “Ariel”.
In his three years in the BBC’s training unit, he became the Corporation’s only in-house voice-trainer, coaching hundreds of broadcasters, many of them ‘household names’ from regional radio and TV, from all the national radio networks and those at the prestigious BBC News Channel.
Peter has presented hundreds of radio shows, has read several thousand news bulletins, and hosted nearly 2,000 podcast episodes, and is a vocal image consultant advising in all aspects of voice and speech training for presenters on radio and TV, podcasts and YouTube , voiceovers and videocalls.
His voice-style is middle aged, male, RP, and friendly-authoritative.
If you would like Peter to work with you on your voice, then get in touch. Initially via a DM on Twitter @TweeterStewart.
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