Quote from: Misha on August 16, 2014, 02:54:57 AM
From what I've read it usually takes 2-3 years of practice before you get a stable and naturally sounding female voice. This may be much shorter if you used to or still sing a lot (that helps to develop the voice range a lot).
Well, if so, I must be exceptionally gifted. And if that's the case, then it's the only thing I've ever discovered myself to be exceptionally gifted at.
I've read a lot of advice as to how to develop a nice female voice--voice coaches, etc.--and I have to admit the advice I've seen totally baffles me because I myself found it completely unnecessary. Complete waste of time and money. It's not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. Now I admit I have two big natural advantages:
(1) My natural voice isn't terribly low--obviously male, but not excessively so. As a result, I don't have to pitch my voice much higher to achieve a very female pitch--a moderately low female voice, true, but clearly a female voice nonetheless.
(2) I live in Ireland with a very noticeable American accent. I'm convinced the result of this is that I don't need to worry about a "female modulation". People pick up on my foreign accent straightaway, and that's what they focus on.
That said, I myself believe the importance of the voice is vastly over-rated, and a friend of mine (a veteran at this game who speaks in her natural tone, which is fairly low) agrees with me. The way I see it, your presentation is comprised of many different factors, and so long as "the overall package" is convincing, you're not going to give yourself away over one or two little things, assuming they're not excessively male. E.g., my hands are slightly big (though not excessively so) and my shoulders are a bit broad (though not excessively so). So as long as my overall look is good, those two things aren't going to give me away.
As a matter of fact, I was just discussing this question the other night with a girlfriend of mine. She's fairly new to the game, and she's feeling very insecure about a number of things, her voice being one of the main ones. Now I told her honestly I don't think she needs to worry about it much. If she were presenting as a guy, people would definitely hear a male voice. But her overall presentation is quite good, the result being that this one factor isn't a killer. A low voice, yes, but quite a few women have low voices. I hear women's voices fairly often that are lower than mine.
I also told her that if she wants to pitch it higher, my own experience has convinced me that that's not really very hard to do. My own method was to buy a voice recorder. You need to remember that you don't hear your voice the way other people do. They hear your voice through their ears, whereas you hear it mainly through your throat. The result is that your voice sounds very different to you than it does to others.
That's why it's important to have a voice recorder. That way you can hear your voice the way other people hear it. What I would do was just to read from a book into the recorder--a light book, easy to read, nothing difficult, nothing that you have to focus on. You don't want to have to pay any attention to the actual words. You want to focus on pitching your voice where you want it.
Start out high, virtually in a falsetto. Then gradually bring it down to where you're comfortable with it. Pitched too high, it sounds phoney--or as I put it, it sounds "->-bleeped-<-". So bring it down to where you can get comfortable with it and where it sounds acceptable on the recorder. I quickly found my level and quickly got the hang of it. It's habit with me now. I use my new voice spontaneously, even when people catch me off-guard by speaking to me and requiring a response before I even have time to think about what I'm saying. I've never once screwed up by speaking in my natural voice--and let's hope that continues.
I've found that just as you need to develop confidence in your overall presentation, walk, etc., you need to develop confidence in your voice. A lot of times my voice sounds "->-bleeped-<-" to me. But I always remind myself that other people aren't hearing what I'm hearing, so I don't lower my pitch. I stick with the pitch that I developed with practice.
I'll also say that I believe it's unnecessary to worry about modulation. People have so many ways of talking that I can't believe something like that is going to give you away.
Anyway, that's my experience and my advice. You're perfectly free, of course, to disregard everything I've said if you think it's bunk. I'll also say that if you have a really deep voice, my method might not be any good for you. In that case, professional help might truly be necessary. So as usual, do what you need to do and don't let yourself be guided by someone else's experience if it doesn't apply to you.
Good luck,
Foxglove
