Voice Acting Auditions: Why "Big" Doesn't Mean What You Think, and Why You Need to Submit More Than You Think
Voice actors who are early in your audition submission practice — anywhere from your first hundred auditions to your first thousand — there are two mistakes I see almost every developing voice actor make, and they're killing your progress in ways you probably don't see yet.
The first mistake is submitting too few auditions. The second is misunderstanding what directors actually mean when they ask you for a "bigger" or "smaller" take.
Both of these come from the same root problem, which is that you're treating voice acting like a precision craft when at your career stage it's actually a volume game with craft layered on top. Let me explain what I mean.
Want to work with me one-on-one?
You Are Not Going to Out-Polish the Industry
Here's the thing about being early in your VO career: there are talented people everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of voice actors are submitting on the same platforms you are, and every single one of them thinks their take is going to be the one. Some of them have been at it for fifteen years. Some of them have built home studios that cost more than your car. Some of them have agents and casting connections you haven't even heard of.
You are not going to beat that field by sending in one perfect audition this week. You're going to beat that field — or at least carve out your slice of it — by showing up consistently over years while quietly getting better with every reps.
There's a quote from the bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman I think about constantly when I'm coaching performers: everybody wants to be big, but nobody wants to lift them heavy weights. It applies to singing. It applies to acting. It applies to voiceover. Everybody wants the big role and the union card and the residual checks, but nobody wants to sit in a closet recording the seventy-fourth audition of the month for a project they may never hear back on.
That's the work. The audition is the rep. You don't get to skip reps.
The Minimum Submission Schedule
Here is the floor I want voice actors at this stage to hold themselves to: one audition per week, minimum, no matter what is happening in your life.
Not one audition per week when you feel inspired. Not one when work calms down. Not one when you finish that script you've been working on. One per week, even if it's a hard week. Especially if it's a hard week.
The reason is not that one audition per week is a particularly impressive output. It isn't. Many working voice actors do five or ten a day. The reason is that one per week is the minimum dose that keeps you in the practice. It keeps your home studio running. It keeps your file workflow active. It keeps you in the casting platforms checking listings. It keeps the muscle of "make a choice, record a take, send it" from atrophying.
Performers who submit nothing for three weeks and then send a flurry of six in one panicked weekend almost always send worse work than performers who quietly send one every Sunday afternoon for six weeks straight. The consistent person has been practicing the process, not just the performance. They know their gear works. They know what they sound like this month. They've stayed connected to the listings.
If you are busy, do one. If you are sick, do one when you're well enough to make sound. If you are slammed at your day job, find twenty minutes on a Saturday. The number you're protecting is not "high output." The number you're protecting is not zero. Zero is the killer. Once you stop entirely, getting started again takes weeks.
Submit the Take Even When It Isn't Right
Here is something that took me a long time to understand, and which I now say to every audition-stage performer I coach: the casting director isn't listening to your worst take and judging you on it.
They're listening for your best take.
When you record three takes of an audition and one of them really sings, one is fine, and one is a swing that didn't quite land — your instinct is going to be to cut the swing. To send the two you're proud of. To keep the bar high.
Don't do that. Send three. Send all three.
Because here is what is actually happening on the other side of that submission: a casting director with a stack of two hundred auditions is looking for anything that grabs them. They are not auditing your consistency. They are not penalizing you for take three being weaker than take one. They are scanning for the moment in your file where they go oh, there it is, that's interesting, that's the voice. And if take two has the read that catches their ear, you needed to send take two. If take three has a swing they didn't ask for but accidentally matches their actual vision better than the direction sheet, you needed to send take three.
The flip side of this is just as important: if you finish an audition after the deadline, send it anyway.
I'm serious. Send it. The project may be closed. The director may have already cast it. It doesn't matter. The act of finishing and submitting is the act you're trying to build into a habit. The casting director may also keep a roster of voices they liked even when they couldn't cast them — and that voice might come up in their head three months from now when a different project needs exactly your sound.
The cost of submitting a late audition is roughly zero. The cost of not finishing the workflow is that you now have an unfinished project sitting in your editing software, which becomes friction the next time you sit down to record, which becomes a reason to skip a session, which becomes the start of you falling out of the practice entirely. Finish it. Send it. Move on.
What "Big" and "Small" Actually Mean
Now to the second mistake, which is where craft starts to interact with mindset.
When a casting director or coach says "give me a bigger take," most new voice actors hear "louder." When they say "smaller," they hear "quieter." Volume is not what those words mean. Volume is sometimes a byproduct, but it is almost never the actual note.
What "big" and "small" actually refer to is the intensity and emphasis of the character's qualities. How much of the character's defining traits are you turning up?
Take a character who's been written as quiet, analytical, internal. The trap is to assume that a "big take" of that character means loud — which would just be the same character contradicting their own nature. A "big take" of an internal character isn't loud. It's more internal. More focused. More clipped. The analytical quality cranked up so far that the character feels like a scalpel. The same volume — sometimes even quieter — but with every syllable carrying more weight.
Now take the opposite: a character written as huge, loud, theatrical, expansive. A "big take" of that character isn't louder either, because they're already at the top of their register. A bigger take of a big character means turning up the quality that makes them big — the swagger, the theatricality, the disregard for the room. And here's the counterintuitive move that's worth understanding: a smaller take of a big character can be the most chilling reading you can give. Imagine the most dangerous villain in any animated film you can think of — Scar, Hades, Frollo, Maleficent, Mother Gothel, Ratigan. The terrifying version of any of those characters isn't them shouting. It's them dropping into a near-whisper while still completely in command of the room. Volume goes down. Character intensity goes up. That's a "smaller" take that's actually bigger.
The rule of thumb I give performers: after your first natural read, do one take that's bigger than feels reasonable and one take that's smaller than feels reasonable. Not louder and quieter. Bigger and smaller in character. The first take is usually closest to what the director asked for. The second and third takes give the director a sense of your range — which is what they're actually casting on at this stage of your career, more than they're casting on whether you nailed their specific direction sheet.
There is also a hidden reason this matters: directors often don't know what they want until they hear it. The direction sheet was written before they'd auditioned anyone. They thought they wanted quiet and analytical. Then they hear your bigger take and go oh, wait, what if this character was actually intense? — and the project pivots. You don't get that pivot if you only sent the version of the read they asked for. You get it by giving them a window into what else this character could be.
Building a Demo Reel from Audition Reps
The natural next stage after consistent audition practice is the demo reel, and the principles are continuous with what we've already discussed.
For each character you're including, the goal is two or three lines that showcase the core trait of that character, not a comprehensive sampling. Listeners — directors, casting agents, producers — make decisions about your reel within seconds. They are not going to listen to seven variations of a character to decide whether you can do that voice. They will decide on the first three seconds, and the next two or three lines either confirm the impression or contradict it.
So when you're going through a script of lines for a character, your job is not "record all of them." Your job is read all of them, find the two or three that most efficiently communicate this character to a stranger, and record those. A line where the character announces what they are. A line where they do the thing they're best at. A line that shows a moment of contrast — where they drop tone, change pace, reveal a second color. That third line is the one that lifts the character from "type" to "person." You want that on the reel.
Practice your demo work at the pace of one character per day, not one reel per week. Working a character a day means you get to live in that voice long enough to find what makes it actually yours rather than a generic version of the type. The voice acting world is full of generic versions of every type. The version of any given character that comes specifically from your instrument, your sense of humor, your sense of weight and pace — that's the version that gets you cast. You don't find that in a single rushed session. You find it by spending an hour with the character, putting it down, and coming back the next day to do another.
And listen to professional demo reels daily. Bookmark a demos page, throw it on the home screen of your phone, and put three or four reels on while you're driving or walking or making coffee. This is the equivalent of a young musician listening to recordings — not to copy, but to keep your ear calibrated to the level you're aiming for. You cannot reproduce in your mouth what you don't have in your ear first.
A Few Pieces of Workflow Hygiene That Save You Money
A handful of small things that I tell every voice actor to lock down because they're the kind of things that quietly cost you opportunities:
Export your finished files as MP3, not as the project file from your editing software. A casting director cannot open your Audacity or Reaper project. If they receive a project file instead of an audio file, they delete it and move on. They do not email you for clarification. They have two hundred other auditions to listen to.
Only slate if the casting notice specifically asks for one. A slate — that's where you introduce yourself, the role, and the take number at the beginning of the file — adds time and gives the director something to fast-forward through. If they want one, they'll ask. If they don't, skip it. Get straight to the read.
Keep your folder structure clean. When you've sent four hundred auditions, you will not remember which character belonged to which project. Future you needs past you to have used consistent file names.
The Mindset to Hold
If I had to compress all of this into one idea, it would be this: at your career stage, your job is to stay in the practice. Not to be perfect. Not to make the casting director love every take. Not to feel ready before you submit. Your job is to keep showing up, to keep recording, to keep finishing, and to keep getting your voice in front of people who are casting.
The performers who break through are not the most talented ones in the room. They're the ones who were still in the room after most of the talented ones quit. They're the ones who submitted in November when work was slow and in March when life was chaotic and in August when nothing felt like it was working. They're the ones who, by the time their voice did mature into something special, had three years of audition reps backing it up.
Submit the audition. Submit the late one. Submit the weird take. Listen to demo reels in your kitchen. Practice one character a day. Keep the floor at one per week and let the ceiling build itself over time.
That's the work. There is no shortcut around it.
Want to work with me one-on-one?
Looking for more?