Is my voice good enough?

I think you have a great voice and accent.

Since that was only meant to showcase those two things, I cannot critique your delivery, but that is just as important.

I learned this over 11 years of being on a TV infomercial - delivery is critical.

The recording process (whther on video or audio) sucks out about 10 - 15% of the energy that you put in, so you have to amp yourself up - almost to the point of feeling "silly" so that the energy "sounds right" once it's played back.

That's my presentation tip for today!

Dave

PS: based on just your voice, I would guess about 30.

Yes, your voice is plenty good enough for doing voiceovers. You have a good mic, minimal background sound, and a pleasant vocal tone. I'd guess that you're quite young and from New Zealand, but I'm lousy with accents so I'm probably wrong .

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Tejaboo, your voice is definitely "good enough." Just fine, actually.

Where I'm from in the US, your accent would be something of a rarity, and I had no problem whatsoever understanding everything you said.

As long you enunciate your words -- which is important for anyone making an audio recording -- you'll do great. Take heart in the fact that a number of very popular radio personalities, such as Tom Leykis and Adam Carolla, were told early on in their career that their "voice wasn't right for the radio." If you're familiar with their careers, you know that it turned out to be hogwash.

Personally, I'm not sure if I have a great voice for that line of work, but I certainly have a face made for radio.

Thank you all so much for the feedback!

@Dave, Thanks for the presentation tip, I will most definitely make use of it. I'm nowhere close to 30 years old though

@Gail, I live more or less on the other side of the planet actually, I am quite young though.

@Damien, Thanks, I'll look into the careers of both Leykis and Carolla.

Voice sounds okay by me, good luck on the presentations

I think your 17?

I had a friend from Brisbane that grew up in Queensland. Sounds just like you. Oh well

This is coming from a sound freak of 12 years (music production) but your voice is good man no need to worry about it.

You don't have the best voice in the world in terms of radio, but thats ok as lots of these guys learn this stuff over the years. Radio people also have very organic, raspy sounding voices that makes it easier to articulate their words. Or it just makes their words sound more natural/comfortable to listen to.

I'll give you a secret, but I can take your voice in that video and make it sound 10xs better using some simple sound "tricks". For instance, I can change the entire stereo field to make it sound A LOT wider/deeper. This is done by layering your voice 2 more times, panning one left, another right, then offsetting the pitch & time of each side by fractions of the original. What this does is trick the brain into hearing 1 overall sound, when in fact there are 3 different sounds. The brain can not pick up on slight variations of sound like this, and instead will percieve that sound to be bigger/larger/more present.

It changes the original stereo field which changes how people percieve your voice.

I could add a low level of natural sounding distortion, to bring out the raspy aspects of your voice and make them more present. I can use a transient shaper to make your voice have more "impact". I can use compression to warm it up and make it sound perceptually louder.

Then a bit of reverb which will REALLY thicken your voice up lol.
In fact I will do this for free today just to show people how you can take an average voice and make it radio ready in minutes.

Will be back later with a before/after of the OPs voice.

-Red

ps. I'm just doing this for fun because I think more marketers need to be aware of these simple sound "tricks". There is SO MUCH you can do with sound its not even funny. You can even add nlp anchors at a barely audible frequency to make people think things they're not even hearing. Although this would need to be proven using a split test, and I'd need a lot of warriors to volunteer. Maybe for another day..

Thanks a lot for all the replies! And Red, I'm really looking forward to the audio!

For the people that are interested, I live in the Netherlands.

Well your voice is perfect because it is yours. You are a brand for you website and products and should be reflected in all your content.

Be proud.

I GOT BAD NEWS!!

This is HORRIBLE news in fact.

I just found out google has STOPPED audio scraping of youtube videos.
This is BAD as millions of people world wide use these scraping tools like "youtubetomp3.com" or mp3converter.com".

To boot the video that was posted in here is not even copyright, youtube has NO RIGHT doing bs like this GOD I HATE GOOGLE!!

So the question remains now, how are we suppose to scrape audio from videos? NONE of the tools on google work any more to do this (unless youtube is trying to release their own tool I'll have to check on that)

So if the OP would like me to beefen up his voice, or anyone else, maybe you can upload an mp3 file OUTSIDE of youtube? (with no video)

Otherwise I'll have to figure this out later. My only choice will be to record it live using a mic and although that can be done I can't do it till later when I get home.

Sorry guys - Red

Red, I have sent you a PM with a link to the audio file. And I actually think Gary's idea is quite a good one, I imagine a lot of people will be interested in improving the sound of their voice.

I hope you will share with the class! Your voice and accent are excellent. Americans love an accent.

Many non native speakers are self conscious about their accents. It usually has a nice combination of English (since you probably didn't learn from an American) with your native tongue. I am self conscious when I speak Italian, but my Italian family loves it. Who knew?

I agree - your voice sounds fine.

To me, it's the enthusiasm and energy you convey (as well as the content obviously!) that really matter in audios and videos. You can bounce around and really connect with an audience whilst not sounding great or saying too much and still make lots of money (look at Justin Bieber). :-)