Vocal variety: the rollercoaster

By Alastair Greener, presenter of Present Yourself in a Minute · Updated 5 November 2026

Vocal variety is the difference between a voice that carries a message and one that sends people to sleep. You have three dials: pace, pitch and volume. Most speakers only touch one of them, and usually by accident.

Why voices go flat

Three things cause it. The first is reading. When the eye runs ahead of the meaning, the voice follows the rhythm of the sentence on the page, and every sentence lands at the same weight. The second is nerves, which speed you up and tighten your pitch. The third is over-rehearsal of one phrasing, where you say the same words the same way for the tenth time and stop thinking about them.

The fix for the first is speaking from notes. Bullets force you to decide the meaning of each point as you say it. Present Yourself, the one-minute presenting series from our director Alastair Greener, makes the same point: use bullets, not a script.

The three dials

• Pace. Slow down for the points you want kept. Speed up on a story that already carries energy, such as the moment a shoot went wrong.
• Pitch. Let it move across a sentence. Finish a complete thought with a slight fall, and lift only where you genuinely ask something.
• Volume. Go up on the big line. Dropping in volume makes people lean in, which is often more useful than getting louder.

Build the rollercoaster into a talk

1. Mark your peaks. Pick the three or four sentences you want the room to remember.
2. Mark the drops. Put a short, plain sentence after each peak so the peak has room.
3. Pause before and after each peak. The pause tells people that something has just been said.
4. Let stories run looser and figures run slower. A number needs time to land.

A made-up line shows the idea. The unmarked version reads: "We missed the deadline by three weeks and nobody said it out loud until week two." With the rollercoaster applied, the speaker slows on "three weeks", pauses, then drops quietly into "Nobody said it out loud until week two." The words are the same. The second version has shape.

Common mistakes

• Slowing down on everything. If every point is slow, none of them is.
• Rising at the end of every sentence. It sounds like you are asking permission.
• Using volume alone. A louder voice with no change in pace sounds like shouting.
• Stressing every important word. Emphasis works only when it is rare.

Check it on playback

Record a run-through of two or three minutes, even if it is audio only. Listen with your eyes closed. Note where you could have dozed off, and where you sounded like yourself. Then ask a listener to name the three things they remember. If they cannot, your peaks are in the wrong places or there are not enough of them.

For the mechanics of projecting without strain, see projecting your voice without shouting. The pause gets its own treatment in the power of the pause, and pace covers the common problem of speaking too fast. To practise interview answers on camera, see what happens in a media training day.

Related guides

• Pace: why you are still too fast when you speak
• The power of the pause in speaking and presenting
• Projecting 10% more without shouting
• Cutting fillers: um, ah, like
• Smiling voice
• All guides and tools

The picture at the top of this page is an illustration, not a photograph of a client or a real job.