0696 – Voicing ‘Minor Characters’ in Audiobook Narration

2022.11.27 – 0696 – Voicing ‘Minor Characters’ in Audiobook Narration

Minor characters - You don’t need a totally unique voice for each character. Listeners know you are telling a story, not pretending to be different characters or that the production has a cast of hundreds. Have changes in your voice, but don’t worry about creating 30 or 40 different characters, some of whom will only have a line or two.

Similar characters - When the book calls for several similarly-sounding characters talking with each other (“The four friends, Bob, Dave, James and Pete, each cracked open a beer and started talking about what had just happened…”), how will you make each voice distinctive from the other? Consider elements such as pitch, nasality, rhythm and speed… all of which we have spoken about before. If they are minor characters appearing only once, then differentiation is less important.

Acting - On the whole, you’re not ‘acting’ each character: you just have to give a flavour of the personalities, not a full exposition. You are illustrating a character … not putting on ‘a voice’. The voice comes from the characteristics of the person, so you act the character rather than purely giving them a voice. Just enough is enough. If you are too OTT then the listener will hear you, and not the story. So: You don’t need to shout or scream as the actual character might do; use some mic technique, and pull back from the mic to make it immersive without blasting the listener.

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