Tongue-Tied Up on a Word? Use Tongue Twisters.

For my voiceover/narration friends and singing students who follow me here: 

A colleague asked a question about how to pronounce certain words when saying them comes out sounding wrong. In this case, it was "protests."

Here's my answer. It might be helpful to others of you as well.

"First, you need to do some practicing of those sounds together without the rest of the word. Step away from the mic for a bit. Go out into the sunshine and just do a bunch of sts sts sts sounds. So, it would be like saying the sts of "Protests" without the "prote." Practice that a lot. You are having trouble getting the tip of your tongue away from the "t" and onto the "s" and off the "s" quickly enough and you need to build some facility doing that. The sibilance and the length of sound will reduce once you gain speed with it without getting caught up on the word itself.

Whenever I have trouble with a particular word when I'm doing narration or voiceover work, I head right to tongue twisters to practice the sounds of the word. 

A good one for sts is: 

Amidst the mists and fiercest frosts,

With barest wrists and stoutest boasts,

He thrusts his fists against the post,

And still insists he sees the ghosts.

Do that one a lot and it will help.

In high school, I played Jennie Parsons in our production of "Down in the Valley." There is a point at which Jennie must scream the scream to end all screams, at which point, the entire action of the show comes to a dead stop and it's just her scream that sounds and sounds and sounds. Well, I was sick. Unknown to all of us, I actually had pneumonia, but I decided it was just a bad cold and so I kept going with the show (I was the lead and there was no understudy).

On opening night, when it came time for me to scream (and this is an operetta mind you so it wasn't like we could slow down or back up or anything since the music came to a stop when it did and I was supposed to scream and that was supposed to climactically end the scene), I opened my mouth and absolutely nothing came out. So, there I was with everyone else frozen, the music stopped, the entire stage silent, and I had nada. The next night and through the end of the run, I had one of the guys in the chorus be my screamer. I would mime scream and then I'd touch his arm (we made sure he stood next to me) and he would scream for me. He had a scream that would curdle milk and make Freddy Krueger look around anxiously. And he saved my butt.