Hello, I’m Gareth Jameson. I’m an actor and a voice coach from www.londonviocelessons.com. Here are some tips for working on your voice. Now, the secret to any accent, is to isolate the key sound that is specific to that accent. So when we are talking about a New York accent, and we are going to talk about a really old fashioned style New York accent like you get in your old gangster films. So this is probably not as common today, but it does still exist with some speakers. The first sound is the ‘R’ sound.
Unlike general Americans, an ‘R’ sound in New York is only pronounced when it’s before a vowel. So listen to the phrase. Are green cards brighter, are green cards brighter. Listen to are and cards. Even though there’s a letter ‘R’ in those words, you don’t hear it. So it’s not cards, it’s cards. Are green cards brighter. Our next feature is the vowel ‘er’ as in verse and ‘oi’ as in voice. They become almost the same.
Don’t go too far where you sound silly. So don’t say, thirty third with an ‘oy’. It’s almost there, thirty third. Verse, that’s verse, verse. He sang the first verse with his beautiful voice. He sang the first first with his beautiful voice. So they’re very similar, but not exactly the same. He sang the first verse with his beautiful voice. There’s another one there as well in, the first verse and his beautiful voice.
We’ve got ‘da’, he’s saying ‘da’ first verse. It’s fairly common for ‘th’ sounds to be replaced with T’s or D’s, so that you hear, ‘da’ first verse. The next feature is the caught and ‘caught’ vowels. They’re different in British, English, in New York they’re the same, and they’re very long, drawn out sounds. So we hear, don’t let the dog walk across there. Don’t let the dog walk across there. There’s another example of that ‘th’, across there. Don’t let the dog walk across there. Now if we take that T H, t t t, instead of, th th th, and mix it with an earlier sound, the first verse, we get the stereotypical New York.
So that instead of thirty third, you get thirty third. The corner of thirty third and third. Now of coarse that’s going too far, that;s a little stereotypical, but if you’re doing this for a play or you’re in a show, then why not go that extra mile and you can bring it back if you need to.
