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Finding a Puppet's Voice

Finding a puppet’s voice and attitude are personal challenges. Oftentimes, I will not use a puppet in a story due to the voice being a challenge to find and maintain. Sometimes the puppet’s voice will change or I will forget how that puppet talked. These are typical challenges one has when first using puppets with storytelling.

 
My camel puppet tells with me How the Camel Got Its Hump. When I first found the camel’s voice, I had placed the voice in a bad place in my throat causing me to strip my throat each time I said HHHHuph! I would have to save that story to the end or drink water during the performance which is distracting. I practiced finding a better voice and placed it higher in my throat to avoid the abuse to my vocal cords and found a better way to breathe when I told the story. I was using my throat muscles rather than my diaphragm which caused more pain than necessary. By making these adjustments, I saved myself a lot of throat damage.
 
I also learned that having an attitude with a puppet is as affective as having a certain voice. My camel, llama, and dog all sound a lot alike. They aren’t typically in the same concert, so no one knows I’m a one-trick-pony. Even if they all appeared in the same concert, each has a different attitude and tells a different story. They seem different even if they sound similar.
 
It is more important to protect your throat than have the best puppet voice in the world. Choose the attitude you want the puppet to have and allow the voice to develop through the attitude and the story.