I am a professional writer (next month will be 51 years) but I'm also, kind of on the side, a professional director of cartoon voices. I also host panels with cartoon voice actors at comic conventions and online.
At every panel, I make time for a little speech cautioning aspiring V.O. performers to beware of teachers and coaches who are not very good at teaching and coaching but who are sometimes very good at convincing you that you'll have the career of your dreams if you write them a very large check — or even a series of very large checks — to take lessons.
Please read and understand the following sentence: There are some very good, very honest teachers of voiceover but there are also some very poor ones and some of them are not very honest.
It is not unusual for the latter kind to offer very cheap introductory classes as a means of getting in touch with suckers aspiring voice actors. Those beginning classes may be worth what you pay for them but too often what happens is that they function like those free seminars that turn into relentless sales pitches to purchase time-shares.
They tell you how great you are and how you have such potential to become the next Frank Welker (or Rob Paulsen or Tara Strong or Nancy Cartwright, etc.) if only you had that little bit of instruction and polish that they can give you. You will be stunned at how much they'll charge you for that little bit of instruction and polish.
Beware, beware, beware.
Voiceover is a lucrative field for — and I need to use boldface again here — some people. Like any glamorous, well-paying show-bizzy career, the vast majority of those who aspire to the field do not achieve the success they seek. That is not possible due to the simple math of X number of jobs and at least 10X the number of applicants…and some would say it's more like 100X or more. One of the good things an honest, professional coach can do for you is to give you an honest appraisal of your talents.
The honest ones I know will not take your money if they don't think you have a good shot at a career. The dishonest ones will always tell you you're so close; you just need their deluxe, even-more-expensive master class. Bank accounts — students' or their parents' — have been wiped clean by those additional deluxe classes.
How do you know who the good and honest ones are? I'm not going to name names here; just urging caution. Generally speaking, there should be a real, successful career connected with them. Either they've had one or they're recommended by folks who've had them. You should know the names of people who've had the kind of career you seek. Many of them are reachable via social media. Most of them will respond to an e-mail or D.M. asking them for a recommendation.
Don't pester him with questions but do spend some time at this page that was set up by one of the best, most in-demand voice actors working today, Dee Bradley Baker. There are coaches who will charge you thousands of bucks to give you less good advice than you can get for free on Dee's site. Some of those coaches, by the way, have real slick, professional-looking websites.
(And don't pester me, especially if you haven't studied every single page of that site. And while I occasionally participate in classes run by others, I don't teach and probably never will.)
As you might imagine, I am motivated to deliver these cautionary lectures because I have seen some horrible exploitations. We're talking about young (mostly) folks who shelled out vast sums of dough on lessons and at the end of those classes, all that resulted was that they were told they needed to pay for more lessons. In a couple of instances, a loving parent forked over money they could really not afford, trying to help their kid achieve his/her "dream" profession…and the kid got nowhere.
I am not trying to scare you away from voice teachers. Like I keep boldfacing here, there are some wonderful ones. I'm trying to scare you away from the kind that took $12,000 from one poor lady who thought she was buying her daughter a career. I heard the daughter's demo and an honest coach would have told her that she simply didn't have the talent necessary to make it in The Business and should seek out a different profession.
The last I heard, the daughter was indeed working in front of a microphone. It's the one at a Romano's Macaroni Grill and she uses it to tell waiting customers their table is ready. You can master that skill for way under $12,000.
