The Voice Within

John Burr is Sarasota’s resident master, teacher and expert on all things of recorded voice.

Although his career has included everything from working as a professional trombone player to being the assistant conductor of the U.S. Air Force’s Singing Sergeants chorus, Burr found work as a voiceover actor by happenstance.

After years working in traditional music and theater, Burr built a recording studio in the 1980s in Washington, D.C., aimed at symphony and orchestra recording. However, he soon seized the vast market for quality voiceover work after various actors asked for assistance on vocal delivery and recording.

“The largest misconception most people have is that they think voiceover is easy,” says Burr. “It isn’t, and one of the first things my students say when they first start working is, ‘Man this is hard.’”

In 2003, Burr and his wife moved to Sarasota. Burr slowly moved his lucrative production studio from D.C. to Florida. That business included voiceover work by himself and his students for Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, Marriott, Xerox and Lockheed-Martin. And, since 2011, Burr has taught and developed one of the most profitable voiceover talent pools in the state.

Burr instructs all of his students one-on-one in his inviting home studio. Though his house is packed with a library’s worth of books on film and performance and features art that nods to fanciful animation, Burr is pragmatic and professional in the studio. His ears, powered by decades of listening and musical performance, analyze every syllable, sound and sentence his students say.

“I’m one of the few people in the country who does one-on-one training exclusively in person and via Skype for students abroad,” says Burr.

That in-person teaching is essential for what Burr does — he re-teaches students how to read and speak.

“There’s an aspect of acting, English language dynamics and how they are going to use the language,”
says Burr. He articulates to his students when and what words to hit in their delivery, what to emphasize, where to insert upward and downward inflections, and where to pause. And he teaches them to avoid the most common beginner’s mistake: talking too fast.

“The whole thing about voiceover that’s so important is to get to the point that when you deliver a script it sounds so real to the listener they’d swear you were talking to them,” he says.

Authenticity is the prime quality when it comes to voiceover performers’ most common jobs such as ads, museum audio tours, digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri, documentaries, audiobooks and, during heated election years, political attack ads. And in a world where male voices were the industry norm, female voiceover performers have increased exponentially in recent years with clients wanting the soothing, and relaxed mood the female voice exudes.

But no matter the gender of the voiceover performer, it all comes back to the connection a live performer creates with his audience.

“You have to have a common sense about human interaction,” says Burr. “I’m not just reading and recording a script. I’m talking to somebody with purpose and honesty.”