Hiya, I hope everyone is having a comfy weekend (:
Today I’d love to read people’s perspective on their vocal training. I’m barely a day in, finding numerous exercises and opinions and coaches from various backgrounds. And of course practicing for myself.
My question right now is per the title, how important are the technical aspects of finding the right voice, versus simply practicing and re-training your vocal muscles? My femme voice is too breathy and it sounds forced and I have to stop myself elongating words to hold the higher pitch.
I’m wondering how you find the difference between actually doing something wrong (or falling in to beginner’s traps), and just needing to speak that way more frequently and for longer periods.
I’d really appreciate any tips, on this or in general, or even questions from other people! As I don’t see a vocal related thread posted here recently.
I’m basically in the same boat, so take my input with a grain of salt. That said, from what I’ve read, it’s important to avoid, or at least be careful with, guides that focus on muscle training. There are exercises out there that can apparently be harmful and cause injury. When I get started in earnest, I’m planning to begin with TransVoiceLessons on YouTube. The girl in those videos frequently makes the point that nothing in voice training should be painful or cause strain, which sounds sensible and encouraging to me. Of course, there will be muscle memory training - it’s muscle strength training that can be problematic.
That might be off topic to your actual question, but I wanted to throw it out there just in case.
I don’t know if this is the best way to do it, but when I started my pitch range was terrible so I decided to talk all the time in highest pitch voice I could comfortably do and it really wasn’t that much higher. I’ve been doing it for about a week and I can now go a lot higher than I used to. I’ve also noticed that while doing this my resonance moved up even though I wasn’t trying to, I’m thinking maybe I did it subconsciously or something. My voice still sounds masc though, but it is a lot closer to a femme voice than it used to be.