Hi Dale,
I completely understand how frustrating things can be in this industry. I've just had a quick listen to some of your reels and you definitely have a great range of voices and impressions. But I would say the reels you have do sound a little bit "read" in places if you know what I mean, so you might try to familiarise yourself with the text in any script a little more before recording in future, in order to try and make things sound and flow more naturally. Plus considering your vocal abilities and range it's a shame your commercial reel, which really is any VO artists bread and butter, is a little "one note", you don't really show off any of your range at all, which I fear is a missed opportunity. While many commercials do indeed state they what a "straight" or "conversational" that isn't necessarily what they end up going with. For example the last two TV commercials I booked and recorded in the last month, one for a national broadcaster and the other for a major international sporting event, one decided to go with me doing an a loud, overly jolly voice with a Scandinavian accent and the other went with me doing low, dark, almost threatening voice, with just the hint of a Liverpool accent, so you should definitely consider adding more variety to your commercial reel.
Also, as fun and challenging as learning and doing impressions can be, I do find they have very limited usage cases in the professional VO realm... Unless you're recording birthday messages for people in their favourite character voices of places like fiverr or cameo I suppose. But certainly almost always if someone does want an impression doing they don't just want you to be simply reciting the lines that already exist with the original performer voicing them, but usually something completely different with maybe a specific key phrase or two thrown in, so I would try to avoid recording any characters original scripts word for word for promotion as you want to show you can do the character impression so well you can perform the voice with any script... Heath Ledger's Joker performing a speech from Hamlet for example, or Mikey Mouse doing the "Great vengeance and furious anger" speech from Pulp Fiction. Own those voices as if they were your own in the first place and show people that you can play these characters with any script, like when the cast of Futurama read out Trump's tweets in character voices from the show.
Hope that helps, even if only a little here and there, best of luck!
Brendan :)
