hello I'm Gareth Jameson I'm an actor
and a voice coach from ww1 damn boys
lessons calm here are some tips for
working on your voice
[Music]
now you might want to do an American
accent because you're in a play or a
film or maybe you want to impress your
friends or maybe you want to try and fit
in better in the USA
whatever the reason playing with accents
is a great way to stretch your voice and
exercise your speech now the key to
doing any accent is to isolate the
specific sounds that occur in that
accent today I can only give you a brief
overview of some of these sounds of
course the USA is huge and there are
many different accents so we're going to
go for one that's called general
American and we'll start with the sound
Americans used for the letter R now
listen to this sentence are there more
birds are there more birds you notice
that every time there's a letter R it's
pronounced and that's a good general
rule for American every letter R in the
word gets pronounced are there more
birds also it's a very dark sound might
help you to think about this R sound
coming from right at the back of the
throat back here are there more birds
now our next sound is the vowel used in
cot like where baby sleeps and court and
when you catch hold of something caught
and caught there are different sounds in
British English accent caught and caught
but for most America but for most
Americans excuse me they're the same cut
and cut have a listen to this he got
caught by the long arm of the law he got
caught by the long arm of the law so
that got and caught are the same and
long and law at the same sound in the
middle
finally let's listen to the T and D
sounds for Americans we say them quite
precisely like this butter and letter
but they're quite often flapped for
Americans so there's not much difference
between a T and D butter letter master
listen to this sentence with a banner
about the star-spangled banner witty
banner about the star-spangled banner so
there's no difference between Banta and
banner
they're both banner and the medal for
bravery was made of metal the medal for
bravery was made of metal so that's
Medal
and metal they have both become metal