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Full Voice Improvement Guide for Content/Calls

By Cole Lutalo

Warming up the Voice

The absolute easiest way to get an instant improvement to the way your voice sounds on camera is by warming up before you say a word. Don’t take it from me: athletes, singers, news reporters, and even professional video gamers all warm up before performing, so by not doing it before recording content or joining a call, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.The nice part about warm-ups is that they don’t have to be long and drawn out. Below I’ve listed a few exercises I personally like to use to warm up, why they work/what they’re good for, and how to do them. Incorporating even just two or three of these exercises before getting on camera will go a long way for your voice (and your sanity, since you’ll make way fewer mistakes).To make these frictionless, try doing them as you set up your recording setup or grab water/coffee before starting. Again, you don’t need to do all of them, even though doing all of them will help. Do what you can most easily make into a routine that you can repeat consistently.Keep in mind, a lot of these will look and sound goofy. That means you’re doing it right. Don’t let looking and feeling a little weird stop you from sounding better on camera.

Stretches/Moving Your BodyWhy:I can't express how important stretching and moving your body is for sounding clearer and more natural on camera. Speaking is a lot more physical than you think it is. By stretching out your body, you remove any tension you might be feeling in your chest, arms, back, and neck. Removing tension will help you to be able to feel more relaxed as you speak, allowing your voice to travel freely through the vocal cords. When I was a singer, this was essential to my warm-ups and made me not stiff as I sang. Also, moving your body in general and shaking yourself out will go a long way toward calming any nerves and making you feel less "flat" on camera. Additionally, you’ll be able to gesture more freely and openly, elevating the meaning of the words you say.You also will benefit hugely from stretching the muscles in your face. Doing this will allow you to make more natural expressions as you talk, preventing you from looking dead or like a robot on camera.How:Since you’re not singing, I wouldn’t overthink this. You can start with some simple arm swings in multiple directions, jump in place a little bit, do some torso rotations, etc. The exact stretches you do don’t matter as much as you making sure you loosen tension in your upper body and neck. For warming up your facial muscles, simply scrunch up your face, yawn, and move your mouth around as much as you can over and over again to loosen them up and you should be good to go.After stretching, I strongly recommend shaking your body out. Your camera presence will benefit hugely from it. Jump up and down. Shake your arms and legs. Move. It's so simple, but if you do this and stretch for about a couple of minutes before speaking, I promise you you'll feel a lot lighter and more natural on camera.

Tongue TwistersWhy:Ever jumbled up a sentence and had to repeat yourself, or pronounced a word wrong? Tongue twisters help stop that. Tongue twisters combine difficult combinations of letters in a way that forces your mouth muscles to articulate them properly and deliberately. For that reason, repeating some tongue twisters a few times before speaking almost feels like speaking on “hard mode” for a few sentences, so when you go back to regular speech, it feels like it’s on “easy mode” now that your facial muscles are warmed up.How:Find a few tongue twisters online, especially ones that use sounds you typically trip over a lot when you speak. Repeat a couple of them at least 5 times, making sure you’re doing them as fast as possible, yet slow enough that you’re actually saying them right. There’s no point in doing them if you say them fast but incorrectly, so if you need to start slow, that’s still better. Eventually, you’ll get good at the ones you chose, and you’ll be able to say them fast, so once you’ve hit that point, move on to another one.For some examples, the ones I’ve been working on recently are my “bl” sounds by saying “the probable problem with probable problems is that they are probably probable,” and my “sh” sounds by saying “We surely shall see the sun shine soon.”

Lip TrillsWhy:Lip trills are the bread and butter of vocal warm-ups. Lip trills help to loosen up the vocal cords without straining them (because of the protection at the lips). They also remove tension in your jaw, lips, tongue, and face. Additionally, it’s good practice for diaphragmatic breathing because it forces you to maintain a long breath to sustain it. It’s like a compound lift for your voice.How:This is going to sound weird, but again, that means you're doing it right. Take a deep breath, relax your face, place your fingers on the corners of your lips, and keep your lips resting on each other. Now push the air out through your lips (keeping them on top of each other), and vibrate them, making a “bbbbbbrrrrr” sound. Do this for about a minute or two.

YawnsWhy:Yawns help to loosen up your articulator muscles (lips, soft palate, and tongue). The best benefit of doing yawns is that they show you how to raise your soft palate (the soft tissue on the roof of your mouth about 1 cm behind your teeth) to project your voice louder and further, and they show you how loud your voice can actually get. I grew up most of my life as a pretty soft-spoken person, so when I tried these, it showed me the full potential of my voice.How:Yawn, taking it slowly and placing focus on how your soft palate is raising and how loud you’re getting. Do these a few times to help you get in the rhythm of doing this if you need to project your voice louder when you speak.

Humming SirensWhy:Humming helps vibrate your vocal cords without placing much stress on them, similar to lip trills, making it an efficient exercise. It also helps relax the muscles you use to speak and, more importantly, improve vocal resonance, helping you form a much richer sound with your voice. Also, the vibrations created by humming are correlated with reduced stress levels. Practicing humming daily can have massive benefits over the long term, even if you don’t do it for long.How:Hum, keeping your mouth gently closed and your tongue resting on the roof of your mouth. Focus on making a full, resonant sound as opposed to a nasally one. As you hum, do “sirens,” gliding up and down your vocal register in pitch to expand your range and prepare your voice for speaking and optimal vocal variety.

Optimizing the Body

You’ve probably heard the saying “your voice is an instrument.” I don’t like to say this phrase very much in my content because it feels cliché, but it’s true. The problem is, the way most people use their voice as an “instrument” is the equivalent of playing a guitar that has 10-year-old strings that are out of tune, rotting wood on the body of the guitar, and a guitar neck that’s been broken in half and stitched together with masking tape.If you’re not optimizing your body for speaking, you’re constraining the muscles you use to create the sound you speak with, making you sound worse and giving you less presence on camera. The nice part is that this isn’t that hard to fix.Posture
Posture is the best place to start, because with good posture, you can open up your body to create better sounds and give you more presence and confidence on camera, making speaking feel easier and frictionless.I’m imagining you’re probably sitting when you record or hop on a call, so here’s how you sit for a good-sounding voice - try it right now. Imagine your glutes weigh 1000 pounds, imagine them being pulled into your seat below you (if you’re standing, imagine the same with your feet about shoulder width apart). Now, sit up with your back straight and make the crown of your head as tall as possible, imagining you’re at the doctor when they’re measuring your height, and you’re trying to look taller. Make sure to keep your chin level. Now let your shoulders, neck, and back soften, releasing any tension while maintaining that same length.Right now, you should feel sturdy and supported, but free. It might take some getting used to at first, but over time, it will become automatic when you record. This posture allows you to take full breaths and support all the muscles involved in projecting your voice. This way, by avoiding slouching, you’re not constraining any of these muscles, making speaking frictionless.Raising the Soft Palate
The soft palate is a tissue on the roof of your mouth with a squishy texture. If you (with clean hands) take your finger and touch the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth, it should feel solid - that’s your hard palate. About 1 cm behind that, you’ll feel a much wetter, softer texture - that’s your soft palate. Raising this when speaking will allow you to project your voice louder and farther, a lot more than you think. Keep in mind you don’t need to always do this, just when you want to project louder.To practice this, try doing the yawn exercise I described in the “Warming Up the Voice” section. When you yawn, it highlights just how loud and far you can project your voice when raising the soft palate because yawning does a bit of an exaggerated version of what you’d do when speaking. Practicing this will teach you to put it in practice deliberately.Diaphragmatic Breathing
People talk about “breathing from the diaphragm” all the time, but what does it actually mean and why is it important?To show why, start by taking a small, shallow breath into your chest. Now read the next words out loud until you start to fully run out of breath. As you continue to talk, you’ll find that the more you use the little breath that you took before speaking (you can see I’m extending this sentence to be as long as possible, so you really feel the effect), your voice begins to strain. If you’re not fully out of breath yet, repeat these sentences until you do so you can feel what I’m trying to illustrate to you here more clearly. Your voice should sound worse and worse the less breath you have to support it.Now, while that was an exaggerated example, it shows how important your breath is for supporting the sound of your voice. Most people just view their breath as how much gas they have left in the tank to speak. In reality, your breath reserve isn’t the gas tank; it’s the whole car.Most of the time, when you breathe automatically, you’re breathing shallowly, from your chest. These weak breaths, as you experienced in the exercise we did, cause improper support for your voice when you speak.Instead, you should be breathing into your diaphragm, a parachute-shaped muscle at the base of your rib cage. An easier way to remember this is “breathing into your belly,” or I like to say “breathing like a king.” When you breathe, does your chest rise or does your belly rise? In all cases, it should be your belly. Would a king breathe shallowly into their chest, or fully into their stomach?When you breathe deeply into your belly, you can create a more supported, fuller, and deeper sound with your voice and reduce vocal strain, allowing you to speak fully for longer. When speaking, as much as possible, try your best to remember to breathe fully and deeply into your belly.As an added benefit, breathing fully activates your parasympathetic nervous system, relaxing your body and reducing cortisol levels. Try doing this around the clock for the increased health benefits of remaining calm.

Playing With Your Voice

This is the make-or-break part. Using vocal variety, or “playing with your voice,” can go a long way for your overall voice and camera presence on a video or a call. Playing with your voice makes it significantly more dynamic and engaging to listen to. Without it, there’s not much point in doing any of the other exercises I mentioned before.Remember the “your voice is an instrument” phrase I mentioned earlier? Well, on the note of music, imagine your favorite song. It probably has verses, which are pretty lowkey, a chorus that’s bombastic and gripping, and lastly, pre-choruses, a bridge, and maybe interludes sprinkled throughout. Now imagine if the entire song was just the verse, over and over, for the entire 3-5 minutes. It’d get boring pretty fast, wouldn’t it?Now, this isn’t just because the verse is lowkey compared to the rest of the song. Imagine if the song were just the chorus, over and over, for 3-5 minutes straight. It’d still get boring. It’s the fact that you have variation, contrast, and dynamics that make your chosen song fun to listen to. The same goes for how you use your voice. Your videos and calls are your “songs,” and how you say your words are your choruses, verses, etc.Most people just speak as if their song is only a verse on repeat. For example, they’ll speak in a monotone voice in a video at the same speed the whole way through. Without this, you not only sound less engaging, but you also cause your viewers to click off out of boredom, and you also appear less qualified and competent.Others speak as if their song is just a chorus on repeat. Maybe they have some elements of vocal variety that I’m going to mention below, but they only use the same ones in the same way, over and over again. Maybe they use the same word to describe something several times (“that’s amazing; it was amazing; wow, amazing”). Or maybe they end every single one of their sentences in an upward inflection. Whatever it is, picking one or two ways to improve vocal variety isn’t enough; you need to learn to make it into a range.There are a few things you can leverage to make your voice more dynamic on camera:Tempo (speed)
Playing with speed is a great way to control how much your audience focuses on specific words in your sentence. Speeding up words typically makes the audience perceive those words to be less important, and conversely, slowing down makes the audience perceive them as more important. Use this to your advantage. I remember seeing a funny example of this online (I can’t remember who it was that originally said it) that showed how much tempo/tone can change the meaning of your words (imagine each italicized word is your voice slowing down):“I didn’t say she was 16.” - “I didn’t say she was 16.” - “I didn’t say she was 16.” “ I didn’t say she was 16.” - “I didn’t say she was 16.” - “I didn’t say she was 16.”The same sentence. Some of them might put you in jail, others won’t.Volume
Both raising and lowering the volume of your voice can increase the emphasis and perceived importance of certain words. Which one to use depends on the context. Raising volume is great when you’re making a massively important point, especially when it’s something you’re passionate about. You can also use this to surprise your audience to keep them engaged. Lowering the volume is great for when you really want a point to sink in with your audience. You also might want to use this when talking about something sad, secret, or thought-provoking.Pitch
Playing with pitch, how high or low your voice sounds, is just plain fun. While powerful, use it sparingly depending on the context, though. The last thing you need is to speak in falsetto when running a serious business meeting about Facebook Ads.Playing with pitch allows you to emphasize things in a similar way to volume and tempo. Lower your pitch when you want to make a point hit hard. Raising your pitch has more varied applications: conveying emotion, showing empathy, or even mocking someone.Silence
One of the best ways to use your voice is to learn how to not use it. Sprinkling pauses throughout your speech is a great way to make your speech more engaging and add meaning to your words. For example, if you say a thought-provoking phrase and then shut up for several seconds, your audience will sit there and think about it more, perceiving it to be even more important and making them more likely to remember it. You can also use silence to build tension before revealing the end of a sentence or a point, creating dopamine (the motivation hormone) in your audience’s minds.– –Get creative with these. Use them to add emotion, meaning, and range to the way you sound when you speak in your content and calls. Try not to overuse any particular one exclusively, making sure you vary them as you talk. Doing this alone will make your voice sound a lot more unique, even if you’re technically not changing the overall structure of your voice. Vocal variety reminds you that your voice alone isn’t as important as how you use your voice.

Voice is only one piece of the puzzle for how people perceive you in content and calls. If you want to quickly improve your authority, confidence, and overall delivery whenever you speak in your business, check out this free training:

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