Great read! I could definitely picture you in commercials, corporate narration, and audiobooks among other voice acting genres!

For actual gigs and auditions, you will want to edit out the extra silence/room tone at the beginning of your audio file and cut out the breath at the very beginning of your read. A good way to handle the breath at the beginning is to take your breath, pause a moment and hit record and proceed with the read. Or, if you’re already recording, take your breath and pause that moment before reading. This gives you room to edit it out later. Try to keep the beginning of your recording to about 0.5 seconds or so before you begin talking. Casting directors may have hundreds of auditions to sift through, and they will generally know within the first few seconds whether they want to continue listening or move on to the next one. Having 3 seconds of dead air at the beginning may increase the likelihood that the casting director might skip your audition and move on to the next one. 

Your volume is a little low. 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.

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. 

0:22 Missed the word “that”

0:33 Mispronounced “nasturtium”. Don’t be afraid to look up how to pronounce words online if you aren’t familiar with them. Some great reference sources include Cambridge Dictionary (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/), youglish.com, forvo.com and You Tube Videos among other places (there’s a lot of options out there). You can simply type in “How to pronounce [word]” in Google search and it should give you several references. Try to avoid the robot / AI-sounding ones though.

0:38 Mispronounced “carotenoid lutein”.

0:42 Read “brought” instead of “bought”.

0:47 Read “make” instead of “bake”.

I loved the authenticity and realism you brought to your read! Well done!! It kind of tapered off at the end of the second to last paragraph and the final paragraph felt more like a read - be sure to keep the authenticity all the way through; however, I could definitely picture it as a movie of sorts and your character is “living it” as they are narrating the scene and at the end it shows the character actually reading a letter like in a celebration of life with an audience listening. (Although that would be a specific scene/circumstance - so again, be aware of keeping consistent through the whole script.) 

Nice button on the end of your recording - something authentic/improv to make the casting director smile. Well done!

Be sure to listen back and quality check your work on actual auditions and gigs after you’ve recorded to make sure you’ve accurately read the script. Some scripts have more leeway than others in how accurate the read needs to be. For example, commercial or medical scripts may have been run through the legal department and they may not want any changes from what was written. Finding the errors as you practice will help you improve your cold reading skills as well.

Don’t forget to tell us who your audience and demographics are in your homework. Really consider specifics of who, what, where, when, why and how. Think about how your audience is dynamically responding to you as you speak to them. This will continue to help bring the script to life and lift the words off the page. 

Fantastic read overall! Keep up the great work!!