question about female voice

[Eve of chaos]

so for me this is the most daunting thing, ill practice in my car and ill think it sounds fantastic, even get a little giddy, but then ill record it and it sounds awful;.;

anyway all this thinking on voice brought up a question. will it forever feel like your using a voice? or at some point does it become your new real voice, like if you were to talk in your sleep would you use the female voice? and does the make voice ever become hard to do so that it feels like your using a voice?

thinking that id have to use a character voice forever is a little depressing for me. i like the idea that i can change my voice not just becoming a good actress.

[Michael Joseph]

Im not sure if this will help at all because we have opposite situations, but for me now from training my voice it is more natural to just talk in my deeper voice, whereas before it was really hard before I started training it.  To talk in a higher voice, it isnt hard like it was when first learning to talk deep, but its just not natural to me anymore, is that makes sense at all? And I cant answer the talk in sleep question because if I do talk in my sleep, I have no idea how I sound haha.

[Meshi]

It is when i started using on of those digital recorders and when over and over..listening to my voice is when i made progress, cause you can actually alter it until you get the sound like you want it..

[Miss_Anthropic]

I've been practicing my voice a lot (up until this week, I'm lazy, deal with it!) and I've noticed that after a lot of practice my voice tends to stay closer to the female voice for a while than my male voice; eventually everything relaxes and I've got the icky guy voice again.

I think once you get your vocal chords and throat muscles trained to go there and stay for a while, they seem to have something like a memory and will stay there with very little work.

So I guess the answer is yes, it does become your voice.... I think.

~Sara

[Janet_Girl]

I use a digital recorder and a pitch monitor to get where I needed it to be,  Once I found it I felt where it would come from and just stay in that area.

[Eve of chaos]

i think im gonna end up needing a voice coach, i cant find the balance inbetween where it sounds fake and where its too deep

[purple sky]

I found after I went full time,  I relaxed.. I listened to other women who I am peers with. I use my voice how I feel inside. It changes. My mood kinda plays a huge role in how I sound.  Ha, I was angry the other day..I remember hearing my voice and it sounded like a guy to me.  As time goes on you will quite naturally find your own unique range with very little effort..anyway that is what I found...

[pebbles]

It becomes natural enough that if you talk without thinking about it will come out female, and it sounds female if you do talk in your sleep however you can always feel your male voice underneath your female one... Also it will always feel alittle bit like you have to try to sound female which sucks, and your voice might be prone to doing abnormal things if you drink a glass of milk or are lying on your back with your sinuses draining into your throat. although yeah what I'm doing right now makes me sound female and is better than nothing I'd give an awful lot for a normal female layrinx.

It takes time I trained myself I started 7 months ago and I'm still working out some of the kinks in my voice.
When I record myself I think I sound incredibly dumb I think it's natural but I apparently sound convincing enough that when I met my GP and psychiatrist they admitted there first thought was "Hmm I wounder if they are intersex?" based on my voice. (They Assumed I always sounded like that)

[Eve of chaos]

It becomes natural enough that if you talk without thinking about it will come out female, and it sounds female if you do talk in your sleep however you can always feel your male voice underneath your female one... Also it will always feel alittle bit like you have to try to sound female which sucks, and your voice might be prone to doing abnormal things if you drink a glass of milk or are lying on your back with your sinuses draining into your throat. although yeah what I'm doing right now makes me sound female and is better than nothing I'd give an awful lot for a normal female layrinx.

It takes time I trained myself I started 7 months ago and I'm still working out some of the kinks in my voice.
When I record myself I think I sound incredibly dumb I think it's natural but I apparently sound convincing enough that when I met my GP and psychiatrist they admitted there first thought was "Hmm I wounder if they are intersex?" based on my voice. (They Assumed I always sounded like that)

thank you thats exactly what i wanted to know. when i start getting more confident im going to have to try my voice out on people and get an idea if im going in the direction or not.

[A]

You can try it on the phone with strangers, too. Government people, bank people, survey people, etc. While it's much, MUCH easier to be passable on the phone than in real life (voice naturally takes a higher and more feminine pitch on the phone), it's a beginning !

[Eve of chaos]

ive been using my phone to record my voice and it its supposed to sound higher on the phone yet i still think its much too low im gonna need alot more practice>.<

[A]

Remember that the pitch is far from being the most important point in making a voice female. It's basically how it resonates/sounds that makes one sound female.

There is good information here :

https://www.susans.org/Transitioning/Voice/
http://heartcorps.com/journeys/voice.htm

[Rock_chick]

Despite being hung up on my voice...and despite being repeatedly that i really don't need to be, i think just practicing and using it and being comfortable with it is the key.

sometimes it does just trip you up though, often when you least expect it...which sucks.

[VeronikaFTH]

One strange thing about working on a female voice is that even though it might sound ridiculous to ourselves in our heads, it may actually not be bad. And, even is it starts to sound ridiculous on tape, it may just be an illusion.

After about six months of working on voice, I stopped recording one day and left all the recordings on my phone. About a week later I went back to listen to those recordings, but I wasn't sure which file in the folder was me practicing or not. I just picked one and hit play, and there was this woman talking on the recording. It took me a second or two to figure out that it was ME, and i was floored... why didn't it sound that good to me when I recorded it? Then after a few seconds of me listening to it, and then replaying it, and picking it apart and analyzing it, it started to sound awful again.

Ever since then when I recorded, I would save some, and then forget about them for a couple of weeks.. then I went back later and listened to them to see if I had a different opinion of them. And surprisingly, I often did.

I was being so critical of my voice until I thought for a second that it was someone else's...

Part of the reason may have been all the repetition was just making it all sound so ridiculous. Say anything enough times and that will happen. Like the word "soup". Say it a bunch of times... soup soup soup soup soup soup souuuuuup... Gah! What a weird word soup is!

[Summerfall]

One strange thing about working on a female voice is that even though it might sound ridiculous to ourselves in our heads, it may actually not be bad. And, even is it starts to sound ridiculous on tape, it may just be an illusion.

After about six months of working on voice, I stopped recording one day and left all the recordings on my phone. About a week later I went back to listen to those recordings, but I wasn't sure which file in the folder was me practicing or not. I just picked one and hit play, and there was this woman talking on the recording. It took me a second or two to figure out that it was ME, and i was floored... why didn't it sound that good to me when I recorded it? Then after a few seconds of me listening to it, and then replaying it, and picking it apart and analyzing it, it started to sound awful again.

Ever since then when I recorded, I would save some, and then forget about them for a couple of weeks.. then I went back later and listened to them to see if I had a different opinion of them. And surprisingly, I often did.

I was being so critical of my voice until I thought for a second that it was someone else's...

Part of the reason may have been all the repetition was just making it all sound so ridiculous. Say anything enough times and that will happen. Like the word "soup". Say it a bunch of times... soup soup soup soup soup soup souuuuuup... Gah! What a weird word soup is!

I've noticed this too. I was usually a very harsh judge immediately after I had finished recording. Listening back on those recordings, I really didn't sound that bad.

As for the original post, yes, there is a time when it will no longer feel like a character voice (at least for me this is true). Now, if I switch to a male voice, it feels and sounds silly, rather than the other way around.

[Eve of chaos]

o thank you all so much! i think voice was my biggest worry but now im feeling confident, my therapist also told me today that my natural voice isnt very masculine and that if i looked the part she could see it being a female voice, and that greatly improved my attitude, haha ill probably still raise it a bit though cause at this point i still dont hear it :p