Great Voices To Learn From

Great Voices To Learn From is a an extensive list of women and men, researched by me, whose voices are perfect for you to listen to and learn from, in order that your speech and quality of voice, become more attractive…

We speak as we hear, hence we pick up accents from our friends, co workers and of course initially, our parents and school fellows.

So, instead of being a victim of happenstance i.e where you were brought up, where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked or studied etc,  why not choose your own influencers? 

You can choose by whom you want to be influenced by! It’s just the same as choosing which subjects you want to learn at school or at college – you decide what you want to learn and which experts you’d like to hang out with to learn what they know …

…and this is exactly the same principle.

Choose your experts and go direct to the source, not a book that purports to tell you how to speak, but listen to great voices.

Listen to great speakers and you will learn far more than from a book with a cd.

Great artists like Michael Angelo didn’t pick up a book to paint – he went to study with a great artist.

Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra didn’t buy a book on music – they listened to folks they admired – great bands and great singers.

So it is with voice: listen to people who get paid to record their voice (not their face) just their voice and hear how precise and varied musically, their speech can be..

The Great Voices List

I’ve created an extensive list of great voices that you can access 24hrs a day: and here’s how.

Below there are  40  female great voices’  names and 34 male great voices’ names, from which you can pick a name or 10 🙂 and can put each one into the Audible – Amazon Audio Books search box.

Each name search will bring up a list of books, audio plays, podcasts etc,  that your chosen actor or broadcaster has voiced.

Then you can choose a book, podcast, radio play etc which you are interested in and would enjoy listening to and listen to that voice for hours. You put their name into the search box and then choose a book that interests you.

You will find you start to hear their voice in your head AND start to speak a little like them!

Obviously the more you listen the more you absorb – but it really works 🙂

The Audio Books can be very expensive, hideously expensive, but the monthly membership is reasonable and at the moment there is a very special offer on for the first 3 months.

You will have a fantastic variety to choose from:  fiction, self-improvement, documentaries;  audio drama productions; podcasts etc, so you are bound to find something that really interests YOU!

Audio Brainwashing

– which is what you will be doing – is a part of life – hence your accent changes depending on whom you spend time with – but by doing my suggestion you are practising  Targeted Audio Brainwashing.

This means you can learn the accent you want, not just what you hear at college, home or work. 

You can decide, by whom you wish to be influenced and this means that whatever you learn from me (what needs to happen inside your mouth – your tongue, lips and jaw positions) can be made of greater financial value to you.

As you learn the internal engineering from me it’s imperative (essential) to listen to people who are actually using these methods so that you can be inspired and just as important, begin to hear these sounds as your new ‘normal’.

The instant changes that you have experienced & enjoyed during your lesson and seen again and again when you have watched your lesson videos back, are helped to stay in your long term memory by you listening to other people speak in the same way.

This is really important otherwise it is like learning Dutch and never actually hanging out with any Dutch people: it won’t work.

You need to hear people speaking Dutch.

So, using the Great Voices list to help you listen to specific, well-spoken, excellent voices with accurate diction, will really help you to create a great voice.

If you don’t do this – it is much harder to incorporate the sounds (that result from the internal engineering I am teaching i.e. that optimum placing of the tongue, the different lip movements and jaw openings)  because you will continue to imitate those around you.

You will continue to sound those you live with, those you work with  and those you with whom you spend time…

You can’t choose your flatmates, your work colleagues or your loved ones by the clarity of their speech, so it’s important to have some chosen influencers. 

If you want to maximise the value of your money you must listen to paragons (perfect examples ) of what you’re learning 🙂

You must listen to your ‘chosen’ influencers, daily.

I know the method of audio brainwashing works, because this is how I learned many, many accents for which I was paid.

I learned and performed numerous accents for computer games, television & radio adverts,  English as a foreign language for Cambridge University Audio Press and many other voice jobs.

Important:  I know this works for  people who are not voice talent artists. because I have recommended this to many, many students over the years and they’ve found it incredibly helpful, not to say integral  (fundamental) to them achieving the sounds they wanted, so please take this very seriously and use it – it really does work!

Just as our character is influenced by the people we spend time with, so is our voice.

If your loved one has a strong accent and therefore doesn’t have the internationally understood accent I teach you – you must create another audio influence.

You could listen whilst travelling to and from work which might make commuting more fun as well because you can choose content that interests you.

If you are working from home due to Covid, depending on what you are doing, you could even have it on as background noise, as this method of audio brain washing also works. The sounds slip into you mind unconsciously – it’s tremendously effective. 

And remember the great thing about Audible, is that if you don’t like a book / audio drama production – you can change it! No extra cost! Simply do the swap within one year of purchase, whether it was purchased with a monthly Credit token, or otherwise and you can swap as many books/documentaries/audio dramas – as you like!

And the diversity of books is so large now, because more and more publishers and authors have cottoned on to the fact that we want to listen to books that you will definitely find subjects, stories, dramas, novels, that appeal to you.

You will be influenced by their tone and pitch as well as length of vowels, precision of consonants, musicality of phrasing, variety of pace, breath phrasing etc 

Choosing Your Voice

I particularly love the writer Roald Dahl’s voice. You might know him as the author of The Big Friendly Giant or Matilda – wonderful books and luckily Speilberg thought so too! Hence those wonderful films.  

Although Dahl’s voice is of a very definite period and class, because he is so good at using his Handsome Muscles or Levators (for those of you who have or are studying with me) his voice sounds bright and energised –  he does have a place on the list.

The rest of the Great Voices on the lists below, are more modern – some of the performers could sound like Roald if they wanted to, but their natural voice is less placeable and so ‘neutral’ which is far more useful to you…  

If people can’t place you: socially or geographically, they are more inclined to listen immediately, to the content of what you are saying.

By that I mean, they don’t waste your valuable words/content/meaning whilst they are tuning into your accent, nor are they prejudiced subconsciously or consciously by any bias they may have when they hear a particular obvious accent.

This is so important if you want to reach out to as many people as possible.

Hence most voice overs for adverts, have neutral accents as well as superb diction.

Visual Actors as opposed to Actors who specialise in Voice Acting

If you are tempted to consider listening to your favourite actor, please consider this: most visual actors i.e. film or television stars, or even presenters or newsreaders, are chosen for what they look like, not how they sound.

In fact a lot of very good visual actors have some really nasty vocal habits!

Like not pronouncing the d’s or t’s clearly and some substitute ng for n! Fine if they are amongst many visual clues i.e. the scene or the news images, but most mortals don’t have an explanatory visual backdrop to their speech! 🙂

The other habit that makes listening to ‘mostly visual performers’, really dull, is that the musicality of their sentences drops at the end of their scentences.

This is sometimes called, ‘falling cadences’ and it makes them sound like a bored vicar just desperate to get through to the end of his or her sermon so they can have some coffee or sherry!

One of my favourite (and incredibly successfully, visually)  actresses does this – and I absolutely love watching her on screen – but wouldn’t waste a minute listening to her read one of the many audio books she has read for Audible: dull as dishwater .

Sadly her vocal delivery ruins a good book.

This poor reading habit, is also called, ‘Falling Inflections’ which means that the musicality of her sentences always travels on a down ward slope.

This makes listening to her reading frustrating as the beginning of a sentence is full of gusto and mixed pitch and then it drags away – often making t’s or d’s at the end of the latter words – totally inaudible.

Famous people often get away with this, because they read, highly successful books – hence the writing keeps you interested – but if you asked them to read something less well written, you would quickly become disheartened…  And sadly, many people doubt their own ability to concentrate when this happens, rather than firmly handing the responsibility to hold one’s attention, back to the actor.

If you want to hear the maximum value you can create in a voice – listen to your favourite older animation movie with the screen black.

You’ll be amazed how powerful and entertaining those voices are! When you record animation – and I used to a lot – a lot of the characters’ expressions of movement, come from the actors’ vocal delivery.

The voice recording comes first and the visual art animators, take their cues from the drama the actor has created in the vocal delivery: the squeaks, the groans, the pauses, the breaths, the vocal notes going as high as possible and as low as possible. i.e. all the visual action and movement of the animation characters,  has been inspired or made from,  the vocal acting of the actors!

The pictures you see and the characters wonderful movements – used to be totally inspired by the voice.

Nowadays, they put computer  pads on the actors and ask them to move in front of a blue or green screen, so a very modern animation would use both points of inspiration. This  allows famous visually actors to do more voice overs as the deficiency in the voice has been accounted for by their physically movements – but the exercise of listening with no vision to your favourite animation – especially the older ones – is fascinating.

The 74 Great Voices To Learn From List

By using this list to access great sounds, whether you are studying voice coaching with me or struggling on your own, this will help you.

This resource will speed your learning up, keep you inspired and could give you a great education in many other areas! 

If you feel I have left your favourite/s off,  – please do feel free to email your Great Voices to me and I will check them out. 

If they are missing some of that extra precision, that the voices below employ, I will tell you but if I feel about them the same way you do – I will add them to the list and say thank you 🙂

Great Voices – Female

1. Alison Dowling
2. Anna Bentink
3. Anna Chancellor
4. Celia Imrie
5. Clare Balding
6. Doris Lessing
7. Emma Fielding
8. Georgia Groome
9. Greta Scacchi
10. Hattie Morahan
11. Helen Schlesinger
12. Helena Bonham Carter
13. Hilary Clinton (American) 
14. Janet McTeer
15. Jenny Agutter
16. Jessica Raine
17. Joanna Trolloppe
18. Juliet Stevenson
19. Karen Cass
20. Linsday Duncan
21. Lisa Dillon
22. Lucy Scott
23. Michelle Obama (American)
24. Miranda Richardson
25. Miriam Margoyles
26. Mishal Husain
27. Naomi Frederick
28. Penelope Lively
29. Penelope Wilton
30. Pip Torrens
31. Rosamund Pike
32. Ruth Gemmell
33. Samantha Bond
34. Sian Thomas
35. Stephanie Cole
36. Susan Hill
37. Tamsin Greig
38. Vanessa Redgrave
39. Geraldine McEwan
40. Eliza Foss

Great Voices – Male

1. Andrew Sachs
2. Dominic Frisby
3. Adrian Scarborough
4. Anton Lesser
5. Ben Lambert
6. Benedict Cumberbatch
7. Bill Nighy
8. Dominic Mafham
9. Eddie Redmayne
10. Geoffrey Archer
11. Hugh Bonneville
12. Jeremy Bowen
13. John Finnemore
14. John Shrapnel
15. Maurice Denham
16. Michael Glennister
17. Michael Kitchen
18. Miles Jupp
19. Patrick Malahide
20. Raymond Coulthard
21. Richard Burton
22. Roald Dahl
23. Robert Lindsay
24. Roger Allam
25. Rupert Degas
26. Sam West
27. Simon Callow
28. Simon Russell-Beale
29. Simon Vance
30. Stephen Fry
31. Tim Bentink
32. Tim Piggot-Smith
33. Toby Stephens
34. Sir Geoffrey Cox

Wishing you lots of happy and enjoyable listening 🙂 

Rachel

Updated © Rachel Preece 2024.   This material may not be copied or plagiarised without the written consent of the author and must always be attributed to Rachel Preece