Quote:
1) Record yourself reading a paragraph or two and replay it. Really listen to your voice. If it sounds monotone then you need to add more enthusiasm to the way you speak. Rerecord yourself reading the paragraph again with more enthusiasm. Listen to the difference. Do this as many times as needed.
2) Record a phone conversation and play it back to hear how many times you use fillers. Fillers are words like "uhm" and "like". You do not want to speak with lots of fillers. Its unattractive. If you have a lot of fillers take a couple seconds before replying to someone in a conversation to think about what you are going to say and speak loudly, clearly, and slowly. Rerecord a phone conversation a few days later to see if you have improved or not.
3) Now onto speaking louder. Lets pretend your standing face to face with someone talking. Try to imagine you are speaking to an imaginary person behind the person you are actually talking to and are trying to talk over the person in front of you's head (I don't think "you's is grammatically correct? lol). But without actually lifting your head up into the air of course. And your not yelling either, you don't want to make your friend go deaf everytime they speak to you.
4) To speak deeper, place your hand on your diaphragm. Stand up straight and speaker deeper then you usually would. If you can feel your diaphragm vibrate then thats the tone you should be speaking with. Its going to take some time to get used to it.
Best of luck.
I second that. Lol... beat me to it ;P
Anyways, I also love to sing and I know a lot of specific voice exercises if you wanna know some more. They help smooth out your voice, give it a nice sound, train you to be louder, some diaphragm exercises and stuff.
I'd need to give you some audio training through like MP3s, or through a mic... PM me if you wanna get my contact info - SPAM, MSN, whatever.
Roxstar.