Blog
Tongue twisters for radio: a six-minute warm-up that actually fixes things
Tongue twisters for broadcasters, organized by the sound they fix: plosives, sibilants, L and R, and the jaw. A six-minute warm-up, and how not to overdo it.
Tongue twisters have a reputation as a party trick, which is a shame, because used properly they’re the most efficient diction tool a broadcaster has. Five minutes of the right ones fixes the specific thing that’s going wrong with your read.
Two caveats before the list. Warm the voice before you drill it — see vocal care for broadcasters — and if what’s going wrong is bigger than diction, the announcer voice and the borrowed energy are a different piece entirely.
The trick is to stop treating them as a speed contest. Slow and perfectly articulated beats fast and mangled, every time. Speed is what you earn at the end, not what you start with.
How to use these
- Start slow enough to get it perfect. If you fumble, you’re practicing fumbling.
- Over-articulate deliberately. Bigger than you’d ever speak on air. You’re stretching, and you dial it back for the read.
- Three clean repetitions, then speed up one notch. Fumble, drop back a notch.
- Breathe from the belly. Every one of these is also a breath-control exercise, whether or not you meant it to be.
- Two minutes total is plenty. This is a warm-up, not a workout.
Pick the section that matches what you’re actually struggling with. Doing all of them daily is how people quit by Thursday.
For plosives — B, P, T, D, K, G
The percussive consonants. These are what go soft when you’re tired, and what turn to mush at speed. They’re also what your pop filter is fighting.
Betty Botter bought some butter, but she said the butter’s bitter. If I put it in my batter it’ll make my batter bitter.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A proper copper coffee pot.
Red leather, yellow leather. (Also a jaw exercise. It’s harder than it looks.)
Two toads, totally tired, tried to trot to Tewkesbury.
The radio-specific one. Say your own call letters and frequency, ten times, cleanly, at pace. This is the single most repeated phrase in your working life and almost nobody drills it. If your station has a hard consonant cluster in it, you already know which break it falls apart in.
For sibilants — S, Sh, Z, Ch
The ones that get you in trouble with the de-esser. Sloppy sibilants are the most audible sign of a tired read.
She sells seashells by the seashore.
The sixth sick sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick. (Widely considered the hardest in English. Take it slowly.)
Sixty-six sticky skeletons.
Freshly fried fresh flesh.
If you’ve a whistle on your S, the fix is usually tongue position rather than effort — try aiming the airflow a fraction lower, behind the teeth rather than at them, and let the mic do the rest.
For L and R
The sounds that separate a clean read from a slurred one, and the first thing to go at 4:50am.
Red lorry, yellow lorry. (The killer. Ten times, cleanly.)
Really rural.
Around the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.
Willie’s really weary.
Rory the warrior and Roger the worrier were reared wrongly in a rural brewery.
For the jaw and the whole mouth
Tension in the jaw is behind a surprising amount of “my read sounds tight”. These loosen everything.
Unique New York. (Ten times, and the jaw has to move.)
Toy boat. (Deceptively brutal.)
Irish wristwatch, Swiss wristwatch.
The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us.
Before any of these, let your jaw hang open and slack for ten seconds, then massage the hinge just in front of your ears with two fingers. Most people are carrying tension there and have stopped noticing.
For breath control and pace
Long, structured pieces. These are for the host who runs out of air in the middle of a sentence, or whose reads accelerate under pressure.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk, but the stump thunk the skunk stunk.
Do the woodchuck one in a single breath, at an even pace, without accelerating. The urge to speed up at the end is the exact urge that runs your breaks long.
The six-minute studio routine
Before the first break, in order:
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 0:00–0:30 | Jaw slack, massage the hinge, four low breaths |
| 0:30–1:00 | Lip trills, up and down your range |
| 1:00–2:00 | Straw phonation — hum through a straw |
| 2:00–3:00 | Plosives: Betty Botter and your call letters |
| 3:00–4:00 | Sibilants: She sells seashells, Sixty-six sticky skeletons |
| 4:00–5:00 | L/R: Red lorry, yellow lorry ten times |
| 5:00–6:00 | Breath: the woodchuck, one breath, even pace |
Then read something real out loud for a minute, at working volume, so your first on-air sentence isn’t the first normal sentence of your day.
The mistake to avoid
Don’t carry the exaggeration onto the air. The point of over-articulating in the warm-up is that your normal speech lands in the middle of the range you just stretched. Hosts who bring the drill onto the air end up sounding like a 1940s newsreel, which is a different problem and a harder one to unlearn.
Warm up big. Talk normal. That’s the whole method.
Every twister here’s traditional and long out of copyright. If you want a proper collection, the Wikipedia entry on tongue-twisters has sourced examples in a couple of dozen languages, which is more fun than it sounds if your market has a second language in it.