Hi!
My voice is one thing I love and hate, it's not deep to begin with which is awesome. As a kid i kept trying to deepen it to fit in, it kindof worked. But now, I appreciate that it isnt deep, and now that I'm honest with myself about what and who I am. I hate it because I want it more feminine, so, voice training!
From what I've read, pitch is hard to change and not the biggest part of the voice gender, but my ears tell me it's a needed component. The reading I've done has lead me to this routine.
During my 30 - 75 min daily commute, I do 2 to 3 sets of "sweeps" where I go through the vowels (A E I O U Y), going first high to low pitch, then low to high pitch. The goal being that for each vowel I can go high to low and low to high without my voice cracking. If it cracks i repeat the vowel, after a few weeks cracks are rare and I've noticed my speaking voice can more fluidly go into higher pitches. The AM routine also serves to loosen stuff up for a better voice day.
When I'm at work, any time I walk someplace I hold (with my throat muscles not hands) my larynx UP and BACK. I have found that pulling back creates a better sound when speaking so that's how I do the exercise (I dont talk this way to people, it's just a strengthening thing). This strengthening is, I suspect, what enables me to not have my voice crack when going up in pitch.
Recently I've started working on the how part of speech. My in my head voice, I think, always talks more feminine, but the words come out in guy lingo because habits are hard to brake. So when I'm in the car I talk to myself by first saying the words in my head, then outloud. Somehow this lets me focus more on the how and less on the what when doing the outloud version and the words come out less dudely (to me anyway). I've tried this a bit with people like when ordering coffee (where the slight delay isnt such a big deal), and I feel like it works.
Since I'm still new to all of this, I dont have a whole lot of feedback from people I interact with. And I might be going about it all wrong. What do you guys think?
