How to Do Voice Impressions: Learn Different Voice Styles

Doing voice impressions isn’t just a skill for movie actors anymore. If you’re a podcaster, video creator, influencer, or an e-book author, using your voice in different ways can make all the difference in your content.

This doesn’t mean you blatantly copy your favorite celebrity. It’s absolutely about learning their tone, sound, body language, and basically mastering the art of voice imitation to shape a character.

Consider Jim Carrey’s voice as Horton the Elephant, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Count Olaf, for instance. Half the impact comes from the way he talks, not just his dialogues. That’s the power of good voice impressions!

In a world where AI reigns supreme, however, voice acting doesn’t need to be complicated. Whether you’re trying accents, building a specific type of voice, or want to improve your voice acting performance, using an AI-powered voice over tool, like Murf, can take your impressions notches higher.

In this article, we’ll talk about how to do voice impressions, get the right voice, and how a reliable voice over tool can help you achieve diverse realistic voices. Because in this industry, your voice is your only ticket to entertaining and enthralling your audience.

What Are Voice Impressions?

Every memorable movie or cartoon character has its own distinct personality. One of the most prominent things that make them different is the way they talk. Voice impressions capture that. They are all about imitation and how someone else sounds. But it’s more than just copying a voice. It’s a complete performance in itself.

It includes distinctive speech patterns, subtle inflections, tone, pitch, and even the little habits and quirks that make them who they are. A good impression makes people stop and ask, “Wait, was that really you?” It’s in the way a voice artist drags out a word, adds emphasis, or pauses mid-sentence. That’s what makes voice overs believable.

How To Do Voice Impressions

Performing voice impressions need not be stressful. In fact, the right voice over tool can make it quick and easy, and even help improvise your existing audio.

If you’d like to try doing it yourself, give the following a go.

Work on Your Listening Skills

Start by listening to voices as closely as possible. Effective voice actors don’t just hear what’s being said, they’re interested in how it is said. They spend hours training themselves in vocal nuances such as the pitch, tone, pacing, as well as rhythm. They pay attention to detail: how someone ends a sentence, their mannerisms, how they breathe between words, or even place emphasis. Of course, Murf can achieve Emphasis in minutes. 

Practice Regularly

Perfecting any voice style takes practice, patience, and persistence. Practicing your craft regularly will help you build muscle memory. Over time, it will get easier for you to change your voice while capturing every subtle nuance. Keep at it and you’ll get there eventually. 

Record and Listen to Yourself

Performing voice impressions is all about recording your voice, hearing yourself, and gauging your performance. Are you getting closer to the voice you want to achieve? Where else do you need to fine-tune? Note what helps you and use those tactics to make further progress. Recording, reviewing, and refining your voice will help you understand how to learn to produce your target voice. 

Start with Small Steps

You probably can’t wait to start mimicking complex, multi-layered voices, but it’s always better to start small and simple. First, try to mimic characters with straightforward voices. Master the fundamentals, build your skill, and move on to challenging voices. A step-by-step approach will take you a long way. 

Welcome Feedback

Perform voice impressions for the people you know and trust, and ask for their feedback. Welcome constructive criticism with open arms and work on the aspects they bring to light. The purpose of feedback is to hone your talent. Their review can also shed light on fresh perspectives and touch upon areas you’ve ignored.
As you can tell, doing voice impressions takes patience, practice, and a trained ear. It takes multiple rounds of recording, listening back, and tweaking the output until it feels right. This means reflecting the personality and emotion behind the voice, not just the sound.

The trick lies in being consistent and authentic. To ensure this, many voice actors maintain a log of the various characters they’re working on. Some even add emphasis notes and body language cues to their scripts to stay in sync throughout the performance.

As they say, there's no substitute to hard work! From doing video content and audiobook narration to video gaming sounds or just entertaining friends, the difference lies in the details.

Doing Male Voice Impressions

Achieving a strong, grounded delivery requires lesser upward inflection at the end of lines, and a firmer stop at the end of sentences. Think Keith David’s powerful performance as Goliath in the animated series Gargoyles. His voice acting perfectly captured the character’s leadership, nobility, and strength.

Impressions of male characters with a strong presence, like classic narrators, dramatic leads, or even animated villains, need to be especially impactful. Needless to say, it takes consistent practice throughout your career to develop range and make your performances believable.

Doing Female Voice Impressions

Female voice impressions often require more variation in pitch and a lighter vocal tone. To get the impressions right, female voice actors often shift their vocal placement higher, i.e., they try to be more nasal or head-voice focused. Posture and body language can also help; as can the way you move your mouth or jaw.

All in all, the right female voice over can infuse a wide range of emotions, such as warmth, sharpness, gentleness, and fierceness into the characters. After all, it’s not just about sounding “feminine,” but capturing the character’s essence.

Helpful Tips for Performing Voice Impressions in Voice Acting

The first thing that aspiring voice impression artists need to do is: listen. A lot. Examine every detail of the person or character you’re trying to play. Learn how they speak, not just the words, but the pauses, the pitch shifts, the emphasis in that moment. Find out what makes their voice distinct? Is it the tone, the rhythm, or the strange little quirks?

Record Yourself with your Original Voice

Do this often, even if you don’t like the way you sound. Compare your version with the original. Figure out where you’re going wrong and continue practicing until you start to sound more like the real thing. Try voicing different characters with diverse styles. This will allow you to play around with range, emotion, and speed.

Warm Up

Just like any muscle, your vocal cords work better when they’re prepped before doling out the full performance. Humming, lip rolls, or simple scales can help loosen them up and improve pitch control.

Body Language Matters

The way you stand, move, or gesture when performing the voice impression can significantly alter the way you sound. Moreover, the more you act it out physically, the more convincing your voice impression becomes.

Take It Easy

Have fun with the voice impression. Avoid mimicking ten characters in the same day. Pick one and focus on that. Get feedback from someone you trust, if required. Once you get the hang of it, move on to the next.

Murf AI Can Help with Realistic Voice Overs and Impressions

If you’re short on time and need quick, yet impressive results, Murf AI can help. Murf lets you create realistic voice overs and helps you with your job using AI voice actors. It’s great for video production, podcasting, e-book narration, explainer content, product demos, or when you just need a clean, professional voice over.

Murf offers features like voice cloning, pronunciation control, and emotional emphasis for various applications, making voice-creation quick and easy. Its Character Voice Generator tool allows you to create voices that sound real. All you need to do is type in your lines, and the tool will read them out loud. That’s it. No need to hire a studio or buy expensive recording gear!

Surprised? Don't be! With Murf, you can give any piece of audio a personality by playing around with the pitch, tone, accent, and pace. You can also change the emotion or emphasize certain words to sound like a professional voice actor.

Murf is your trusted tool when you want to make videos, animations, podcasts, or any project that requires a strong voice.

• Use Murf’s AI voice cloning to mimic human speech with accuracy, capturing every little nuance and inflection. 
• The Say it My Way feature will enable you to create cartoon character voices as well as audio messages and other voices for your use case with just a click of a button.
• With the Emphasis feature, you can create voices that match your character. Feel free to stress certain words to convey your exact intention.
• The Pronunciation feature and an extensive library make up our perfect AI Character Voice Generator so you can make the characters as unique and striking as possible.

Murf is your go-to AI voice generation tool with features that will get you exactly what you need in a character’s voice. Get started today!