Finding Your Voice: A Complete Voice Training Manual for Actors (Nick Hern Book)

This is a simply wonderful book - well written, straight forward, sensible and wise. The world is not exactly short of books on voice but this is like no other - as valuable theoretically as it is practically - and I urge you to buy it. In a nutshell this book makes sense and leaves the reader more knowledgeable, more confident and more secure. For those fortunate enough to have had the chance to work with Barbara Houseman this book reaffirms her position as the greatest voice coach in the country, for those who haven't it affords an invaluable opportunity to share in her wisdom and experience.

This is an excellent and rare book - a practical voice book that is anatomically correct and well-researched but written in a wholly approachable manner by a sensitive and highly experienced practitioner. It can be difficult to work on your own voice via a book but Barbara Houseman offers a step-by-step guide accompanied by helpful little illustrations. The book contains a trouble-shooting section and warmups and warmdowns for different situations. These are timed and cross-referenced back to the main
text. The lay-out is unusual - clear and fun with little boxes adding information or exercises. I am finding it immensely helpful and interesting.
I teach too and it is helping with my own voice use and understanding of thevoice. I imagine it would be useful to anyone who uses their voice in pursuit of their work - teachers, politicians, interviewers, business people etc as well as being invaluable to actors and performers.
I highly recommend it.

This excellent book is full of great, easy to understand information and exercises to help you to find your voice. Although it's categorised as a book for actors, I think it would be of great help to anyone involved in public speaking or presentations, where using a greater range and depth to the voice is important. I came to it expecting to skip over the sections on the physiology of breathing, but found the whole thing fascinating. There's a good section at the end on troubleshooting voice problems - Voice too quiet, voice too loud, voice too shrill etc - maybe Margaret Thatcher had an advance copy? A practical book and a very entertaining read.