How to Get Started in Voiceover

Last updated September 9, 2025

If I were starting over in voiceover, here’s what I’d do:

1. Get equipment.

2. Get training.

3. Get work.

4. Get an agent.

5. Upgrade everything.

GET EQUIPMENT

I’d buy a microphone (Rode NT1), an audio interface (Focusrite 2i2), and an XLR cable to connect the microphone to the interface. I’d download Audacity, which is free, but also nasty looking. I’d use whatever headphones I already have—for me, it was AirPods 2, which I still use, although I recently started stealing Wiff’s AirPods Max, and absolutely love those. And I’d make sure I have some sort of acoustic treatment in your recording space. Even a blanket over your head can work. I did my first voiceover jobs in the bathroom talking into a fabric shower curtain, with towels hanging over the mirrors and doors to dampen sound reflections.

Recommendations to get started:

• Mic: Rote NT1

• Audio interface: Focusrite 2i2

• XLR Cable: Doesn’t matter the brand [for the most part]. This one’s great.

GET TRAINING

You don’t have to get training to get started. If you’re just dipping your toe in, you may not want to spend several hundred bucks on a class. I started booking jobs on voices.com (we’ll get to that later) well before I’d received any sort of training. Later, I took a few classes and found it really helpful for two reasons: one, you meet other people who have been doing this longer than you—you can see what their setups look like and how they approach reading copy—two, you can get on casting directors’ rosters faster.

Recommendations to get started:

• Voiceover Gurus. My voiceover agent recommended Lesley Bailey of Voiceover Gurus. I booked an hour with her and found it really helpful.

• I took a class with Kelly Moscinski, owner of The Voicecaster. I prefer classes with casting directors (like Kelly) over coaches because once you take a class with a CD, you'll be on their radar.

• Jesse Carroll's VoiceOver School. I did this for one month and found it helpful. He's got a full course to help you setup your own booth, a really supportive community, and a roadmap to help you go from zero to booking your first gigs. I was only in the School for one month because I already had an agent, and didn’t find as much value after I started booking real voiceover gigs.

• Jesse’s YouTube channel is also a great resource.

• Authentic Commercial Voiceover, by Dave Bisson. Great read with some great exercises that I found really helped my auditions. Dave also does a weekly or biweekly live coaching session in Jesse Carroll’s school, so that could be another reason to check out the school…

GET WORK

I’d recommend completing a few gigs before looking for an agent to make sure you actually want to and can do this job, and to get the experience and a few credits needed to get an agent.

There are only two places I’d recommend looking for work, voices.com and voice123.com, and both suck. They’re what’s called pay-to-play, which means you pony up cash to start receiving audition requests. There’s no reason anyone should have to pay for the opportunity to audition for work. The buyers aren’t savvy. Many times they haven’t finalized their scripts, so they’ll come back with rewrites mid-job, and they also don’t know what they’re looking for. Often after you turn in a job, they’ll have notes.

Also, timing matters. If you’re not within the first 50 people to respond to a job, your audition won’t be listened to. As if that all weren’t bad enough, most jobs top out at $500, so you’re going to be grinding out tons of auditions for very little pay. To put it in perspective, most jobs from my agent start at $2500.

All that said, here’s my recommendation to get started:

• Start with voices.com. Do it for one year to see if you even like and can do this job. You’ll learn a lot just through auditioning. And you’re going to need to book some work to get a reel to send to an agent. (Jesse Carroll has great videos in his course on getting started with voices.com.)

• Maybe do voice123.com when you’ve booked 10 or so jobs through voices.com. Do not pay for anything less than the $888/year tier or you’ll never see an audition.

• Optional: If you have money to invest in this career, it might be worth skipping voices.com and voice123.com and instead hiring someone to produce your demo. Spending $2000 to get a demo produced—and to get some coaching in the process—may not be a bad idea.

GET AN AGENT

Once you’ve booked some jobs, cut the finished projects together into a demo reel. Start sending that to agents.

UPGRADE EVERYTHING

The Rode NT1 and Focusrite are fine, but they might hold you back from booking higher-end work. When I bought the Sennheiser MKH 416—the industry standard for commercial voiceover work—my sound completely changed. I did side-by-side comparisons with my old mics—a Shure SM7B and a POS Sennheiser ME66— and wondered how I’d ever booked anything before.

Also, I finally got around to converting a closet to a sound booth. That also made a HUGE difference. Check out my booth walkthrough here to learn more about what I did and all the equipment I use.

Recommendations:

• Upgrade your booth/room first. That’ll improve your sound regardless of mic.

• Mic: Sennheiser MKH 416. Don’t even think twice about it…

• Audio Interface: I use the Sound Devices MixPre-6 II, but that’s mainly because it does double duty with other production work. A ton of people recommend the Apollo Twin X. One of the advantages is that you can buy software to clean up your sound.

• Software: Audacity is ugly. It’ll technically work just fine for everything you need it to do. I used to use Adobe Audition, but hated the monthly subscription fee, so I switched to DaVinci Resolve. They have a FREE version that’ll do everything you need it to do. I use the paid version because I do a ton of video stuff.

• Dump voices.com and voice123. I plan to let both of my subscriptions lapse because they’re not worth it for me. ONE JOB from the agent is worth five on these sites.