Nice read! I could tell you had a smile in some places and the delivery conveyed some warmth and kindness. It felt like a rather intimate, quieter read.

0:05 Read “miss” instead of “missus”. There is a difference between “Ms., Miss, and Mrs.”. A small point, but important for differentiation. :) (Typical comment)

The delivery did feel a little choppy and halted as you went through both the script and the tongue twister. One thing I’d like to encourage you to try is to smooth out the read and try to flow the words and ideas together to craft a story that lifts the words off of the page and brings them to life. It’s okay to read through the script a few times to get comfortable and familiar with it and this will also help to smooth things out a bit more as well.

Staying well hydrated will help to reduce mouth clicks during recording. A good rule of thumb is to hydrate well a couple of hours before recording and drink water in between as you’re recording to stay hydrated. 

As you progress with voice acting, investing in the RX series mouth declick plug-in is a very useful and worthwhile tool to have at your disposal to help keep the recording as clean as possible. 

Generally a good distance between the microphone and your mouth as you are recording, as a rule of thumb, is the space between your pinky and thumb when they are extended apart from each other. Try to have waveform peaks for yelling/loud projection land between -9 dB and -3 dB. For normal talking, try to have the waveform peaks between -12 and -6 dB. Shoot for -3dB of headroom. You may need to adjust your gain for louder and quieter parts; if so, it helps to know where to turn the gain to in order to achieve optimal levels during recording. Having the microphone input pointed at your mouth but offset to one side maybe 20-30 degrees can help reduce plosives, as would adding a pop filter if you don’t already have one.

I felt your articulation and enunciation was good overall. You may want to work on the projection just a little bit more though as you had the ends of some words taper off and become harder to hear. Keep practicing the SOVT exercises to increase your stamina and playing with the tongue twisters as well.

Good start with identifying your audience as a close friend. But take it even further. What does your friend look like? Where are you? How far away from you are they when you’re talking? Are they paying attention to you while you’re talking or are they playing a game on their phone and distracted? How did you get on this topic - why are you telling your friend this? How are they reacting as you tell them the various things in the script? Think about the who, what, where, when, why and how - the context. Conversations are very dynamic. Even if someone doesn’t speak, their facial expressions and body language impacts how we talk. Think about this as you perform your script. As voice actors we want to take the words off of the page and breathe life into them. Make it sound like you’re just talking or telling a story rather than reading a script. Add humanisms and moments that make it feel real. Change up your pacing, your emotion, volume, etc. These help to make it live and keep it interesting for people to listen to.

Keep up the good work!