Hello Sybil,
I can really feel your frustration in your words...
I understand what you mean when you say that it feels like it should be possible to acquire a good voice without extra expense.
But while I have little idea what paid voice lessons would get you, I imagine that their method would require the trainer to spend many hours with you, asking you to try something, and then correcting what you may be doing wrong.
That is, they give customized feedback based on your performance.
If I am right, then this customized feedback cannot really be "shared", because it is all generated from what the trainer observes in your voice.
I think therefore that they are not deliberately withholding information that would allow others to acquire a good voice in order to extract money; it simply REQUIRES this real-time interaction to work. And they do deserve to be paid for those many hours.
There is a more encouraging corollary to the above, though.
If you are able to self-correct what you are doing wrong after recording yourself and listening to the recording, then you would do very well in developing your voice.
If you are able to do this, then you don't have to spend any money at all.
In fact, I believe that is how many others have managed to develop their new voices themselves.
Not based on tutorials or advice, but by listening carefully to their own voices, and improving on the bits that do not sound desirable.
This can be very difficult for some people, and as Stephe has warned,
if you do it wrong, you may damage your voice.
You mention that you do already record your voice, but instead of just recording it and then playing it back quickly only to have a rough idea of "that sounded good" / "that didn't sound very good", try the following when you make your recordings, in order to apply the type of self-correction I mentioned:
- Get a really good microphone
- Record a small sample of your voice ("recording 1"), short enough so that you can do the next step easily
- Listen AS CAREFULLY AS YOU CAN to your own voice, be VERY PEDANTIC about what sounds wrong
(that's why you need a really good microphone, so you can hear your voice very clearly) - Re-record your voice ("recording 2"), saying exactly the same words as the original, using slightly different muscles in your throat to change the quality of your voice a little
(you may want to experiment with techniques you may have read about elsewhere) - Listen, again as carefully as you can, to this second recording, and see if whatever sounds wrong in the first recording has improved
- If there is an improvement (or if the technique you just attempted gave you an improvement), try to base your next recording on this improved recording 2.
If not, base your next recording on the original recording 1 - Repeat from step 4
What this does is to iteratively improve your voice by a very little bit each time you manage an improvement, so that in the long run, you will have a much better voice.
Save and keep all your recordings in order to track your own progress. I have hundreds of recordings of my own voice on my computer, named by date.
(Even now, I still record my voice regularly to ensure the quality of my voice.)
There is one problem with this method: You will often forget what muscles you used to get a particularly nice-sounding short recording you previously made.
So a second recording made a week after the first may actually sound worse. However, in the long run (on the scale of many months), it will get better.
On the other hand, I feel that an advantage with this method is that you can always keep improving it, even when your voice already sounds pretty good, because it does not correct specific, well-known errors people have written about, but your own ones. Another advantage is that it will nudge you towards a voice that YOU like, because you are picking out all the bits that you yourself like and discarding the bits you don't like. So if you don't like a candiFLA voice then you wouldn't end up with one!
To minimize the risk of damaging your voice, ALWAYS, ALWAYS immediately stop any voice practice when your throat starts to hurt, even if it hurts only a little. Stop using your voice completely for at least a few minutes and let it rest. DO NOT RUSH with voice training. Many school teachers completely ruined their voice by using it even when it hurts, and it takes them months or even years to recover from it.
There is no guarantee that the above will work for you, because some methods work better for some people and simply do not work for others. For example, I think that the above will work well for someone who has very keen hearing and able to discern very small differences in sounds, but not so well for someone who tends to think many similar sounds are just "the same". But the above is already my full attempt in suggesting what I believe might help you in improving your voice...
There is also a second corollary: instead of trying to correct your own voice yourself, you could ask someone to do it for you.
But it will be far less effective, because the other person will very likely not pick out all the wrong things they hear. They may not hear them at all, and even if they hear them, they are highly likely to not mention every single detail in order not to offend you.
So I don't really recommend it unless this other person is very good at doing this... which goes back to why the voice lessons may well be worth the money...
