Sometimes it’s referred to as “doing an impersonation”, but others refer to it as “voice matching”. It’s the practice of voiceover work where you need to have your voice match the voice of somebody else so that the two can be used interchangeably. Often this occurs when the original performer isn’t available, or is too expensive, to do pickup work for things like advertisements, trailers, video games or even for a movie itself.

There are definitely voice actors and comedians out there who can do a number of really impressive impersonations. Make no mistake that this is a talent that not as many people have as you might think. Voice matching can be pretty difficult. Like most things, if you have a knack for it, you can probably improve with practice, but it does take skill.

Surprisingly, it also takes some skill to voice match yourself. Today I was hired to record some voiceover for an industrial film for a company for whom I’d done work about two years ago. The catch was that I was updating my previous work for them with new facts and figures. The original script was about an hour’s worth of material. Now, there were4 7 paragraphs of material where information had changed, such as how much the company does in sales each year, the number of employees, etc.

I was recording at the same studio, which made it a bit easier, but it’s still a bit of a challenge. You have to match not only your pacing (which , of course, can be tweaked somewhat in post), but also the tone, pitch, inflection, etc.

Fortunately, the session went really well…after recording a few test paragraphs, the producer swapped alternating sentences of the old audio with the new, and even without doing any editing, a 3rd party wasn’t able to tell the difference between them. As a result, we were able to just re-record those 7 paragraphs instead of the entire script.

I really enjoyed this project, even though it ended up being pretty short. It’s fun to be able to either perform or create a new character, but I learned after this project it can be equally fun trying to voice match my own previous work!