Arts & Entertainment

Keeping Your Character's Voice Consistent

Lesson time 16:29 min

With an original script, Nancy demonstrates how to keep a character’s voice consistent through different vocal hurdles.

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: Maintaining a Voice While Singing · Maintaining a Voice Through Your Character's Action · Maintaining a Voice While Performing Efforts · Maintaing a Voice While Improvising/Ad-Libbing · Ad-Libbing on The Simpsons

Nancy Cartwright

Teaches Voice Acting

The legendary voice actor reveals her creative process for giving life to animated characters with emotion, imagination, and humor.

Preview

ANIMATED NANCY: When you voice act, you need to keep your character's voice consistent through all sorts of situations. Real Nancy is going to show you how to do that, because if I did it, it'd be an animated character showing you how to do another animated character, and everyone's heads would explode. So, Nancy? - Thanks, animated me, and thanks for saving us that headache. [MUSIC PLAYING] - OK, guys. So I thought I'd just take a moment here and show you how I set up maintaining a voice through a record or through an audition, and there's all kinds of things that come into play here, because sometimes there's music. Sometimes there are sound effects of somebody jumping and landing or falling, kind of like extraneous noises that will have to be picked up later, things like that. [MUSIC PLAYING] - In this particular scene, this is with No-Effort Girl. She's in her bedroom. It's in the daytime, and the room is messy. The messy room of a tween superhero. No-Effort Girl, a punk rock adolescent with a honking Hawley retainer stands in the center of her room, singing her theme song. Because everybody knows, a superhero has to have a theme song. OK, so with that, normally what happens is I'm going to listen. The sound engineer is going to be playing a temporary track, called a temp track, for me, so I can hear the music with somebody else that has done a temporary voice for me, so I can learn this little song. So let's do that. [MUSIC PLAYING- "NO-EFFORT GIRL THEME SONG] TEMP TRACK SINGER: (SINGING) I'm No-Effort Girl. I'm No-Effort Girl, and it's easy and boring to save the whole world. Like, whatever. - OK. OK, so good. So what I find out here, first time out, is that, like, whatever, is not part of the song. It's a comment. It's a little attitude that she's got that they've included that into her theme song, which is totally appropriate. So (SINGING) I'm no-effort-- so I don't quite have that tune again. Can we play it one more time, Jeff? JEFF: Sure, no problem. Stand by. [MUSIC PLAYING- "NO-EFFORT GIRL THEME SONG] TEMP TRACK SINGER AND NANCY CARTWRIGHT: (SINGING) I'm No-Effort Girl. I'm No-Effort Girl, and it's easy and boring to save the whole world. TEMP TRACK SINGER: Like, whatever. - (SINGING) To save the whole world. (SPEAKING) OK, good. I think we're good. [LISPING HEAVILY] And so now, I'm just going to turn her into No-Effort Girl, and we're gonna try this. Let's try it. [NORMAL VOICE] Can we just kind of rehearse on tape, as they say? JEFF: Sure. Do you want the temp vocals still in there, or-- - Yeah. JEFF: --Do you want to hear just the instrumental. - Yeah. Let's keep the temp vocal, and let's see how we do here. JEFF: Stand by. Coming at you. [MUSIC PLAYING- "NO-EFFORT GIRL THEME SONG] TEMP TRACK SINGER AND NANCY CARTWRIGHT: (SINGING) I'm No-Effort Girl. I'm No-Effort Girl, and it's easy and boring to save the whole world. Like, whatever. That is-- so at th...

About the Instructor

For nearly 40 years, Nancy Cartwright has voiced some of the most iconic animated characters on screen, including everyone’s favorite 10-year-old underachiever. Now the Emmy winner takes you into the recording booth to teach you the art of voice acting. In our first class to feature original animation, you’ll learn how to develop characters, get performance tips, and hear Nancy’s career advice. It’s time to get animated.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Nancy Cartwright

The legendary voice actor reveals her creative process for giving life to animated characters with emotion, imagination, and humor.

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