So you've been practicing a while, first doing the pendulum versions of the core exercises to build muscle memory, then doing the up and hold versions to build strength! Now you feel like you're pretty strong, and there's no instruction left in the muscle training article. So what do we do now? Simple, we take that skill and strength you've built up and we move to voice!
All of our exercises so far, the BDLD/LDBD, the voiceless "puh" and the voiceless "eh" have all been voiceless. This was to keep pitch out of the picture so we could reliably train resonance, but now it's time to drop those training wheels so-to-speak. After all, there's not much point to any of this if we don't eventually get to a voice we can use day-to-day.
So how do we move to voice?
Well we want to bring as much of the resonance that we've built in the voiceless, to our voice. First things first, it's good to have something to read in front of you so you don't have to scramble to think of something to say while also focusing on holding resonance. Anything works, but this is my favorite resource currently.
We will be using our oropharyngeal exercises as a jumping-off point, as we want both laryngeal and oropharyngeal engagement in our voice, and these exercises achieve both of those. For feminizing students, you'd want to perform a voiceless "eh" exercise, for masculinizing students a voiceless "puh." You want to push as far as you can towards your target resonance and hold at the top/bottom. From that state of very high/low resonance, you want to try add voice to the "eh" or "puh" then begin to read aloud whatever resource you have in front of you
( masculinizing / feminizing ). This will take a couple attempts.
What happens if I don't get a good voice from that?
Absolutely nothing bad, actually, it means you're a part of the majority! If you get a pretty good voice after the above then skip this section. The most common problems at this stage are such:
Between the last voiceless noise, and the first voiced noise, there's usually a short pause. The voice sees the pause as a chance to take a breather before continuing working, so you'll relax during the short pause and thus dropping all of your hard earned resonance.
The fix here is to try to make sound for the entire transition from voiceless to voiced to entirely eliminate any pauses, in what I call a seamless transition. Even if you still drop resonance during the seamless transition, you'll be making sound all the while so we'll at least be able to hear where and fix from there.
( masculinizing / feminizing )
However, so far we've only done what are essentially breathing exercises, and switching from that straight to voice is rough for most. As such, we can add a bridge between our voiceless resonance exercises and voiced speech, by adding voiceless speech, also known as whispering! You'll perform your voiceless oropharyngeal exercise as you did trying to go into voice, except you'll simply switch to a whisper reading while trying to hold your target resonance.
( will add examples soon )Voiceless sound requires just a tiny bit of false fold engagement, and when switching to voice this usually must be relaxed to actually get the voice out. The brain doesn't know how to distinguish between the two yet so it just relaxes everything in the general area as a compromise, resonance included.
This one is a bit more tough to fix. To some degree, a little false fold engagement is required to make sound voicelessly so there will always be at least a tiny bit of relaxing to get to voice. Relaxing the false folds while keeping the resonance muscles tight is a skill that you will have to develop. This can be helped by performing false fold reduction tricks right before switching, as well as generally trying to relax and be gentler as you switch. Blowing harder will only engage the false folds further.
( masculinizing / feminizing )Some mix of the two above and you've been trying to solve them for so long that you're just absolutely sick of all of this and want to quit.
Still, you're not alone. The fine muscle control mentioned above is incredibly difficult for many, sometimes so much so that breakthroughs just don't happen. Here's a last-ditch technique that you can try, and if it doesn't work then you'll likely need an instructor to help guide you.
Perform the oropharyngeal to voice method above, where it's ok to lose a bunch of resonance. Once in that place in voice, read a sentence in it. Then for the second sentence, drop some of your resonance, and hold on to the feeling of letting it go. For the third sentence, try and regain your resonance, doing the opposite of what you did on sentence two. For the fourth sentence, try and push the resonance even further toward your goal.
( masculinizing / feminizing )
This will begin to teach you how to change your own resonance without performing any exercises. If you're lucky, you'll have had some success and can continue on to the next section. If not, you've likely moved in pitch instead of resonance and reach a pitch floor/ceiling before you get to any resonance of note, which is the danger of trying to work resonance in voiced. From here it's a tricky situation, and you'll either need to experiment with combinations of these techniques like crazy and get lucky or find an instructor to help guide you past this dead end.
Now that I'm in voice, how do I make this voice into one I can use all the time effortlessly?
This question breaks down into two more specific questions usually:
My voice doesn't sound great yet, so how do I make my voice sound like I want it to?
Push the resonance further in the direction of your goal. Your resonance is strong enough to get into voice now, but it's probably not strong enough to create the voice you want. This is where you'll speak or read aloud at a resonance that you're pushing hard to get as close to your target resonance as possible. As your resonance will fall off over time, it's good to pause before it does, and restart the process to keep the resonance as much towards your target as you can. It's also important that you're achieving larynx and oropharynx engagement, you need both. We want to chase the feeling of really making the muscles working here, the feeling of struggling hold things where you've pushed them to. Doing so will ensure that we're continually pushing our range towards our target. This does not mean push through pain. If you feel pain, burning, or the blocking of your airway, stop immediately and retry without doing those things, or find an instructor that can help you get past it.I can't hold it for very long, how can I make it so that I can talk all day in it?
Put simply, endurance reading. You'll push yourself to resonance as close as possible to your target, and read for as long as you can before the resonance drops. This will train your body to get used to holding, and even become comfortable holding resonance close to your target for extended periods of time. The above note about pushing through pain applies here too.
Combining these two strategies should push your voice towards your target resonance while also training the endurance to use it all the time if needed. However, these answers might have raised another question:
How am I supposed to know where my resonance is?
Now this is a very tricky question. On one hand, if you're trying to use it as a measurement to figure out when you're happy to stop voice training altogether, you don't need to know. All that matters is that you enjoy the sound of your own voice and/or other people react to it as you want them to.
On the other hand, if you'd like to measure it to make sure you're not losing any, there are two ways.
The Easy Way: Using the OP measuring trick
If you were to perform your oropharyngeal ( OP ) exercise ( "eh"/"puh" ) and you were to stop half-way to the top, how do you know that you're not at the top? Turns out we've got an intuitive sense of "I'm not there yet" that we can use in a clever way by asking ourselves "by how much am I not there yet?" Are you far from the top? Close to it? It reveals that we seem to have an intuitive sense of distance to the top or bottom of our range.
So now lets put that understanding to work. Perform your OP exercises, then switch to voice, holding that voiced resonance while immediately switching back to your OP exercises. You should now be in your OP exercise, at the same resonance that you left that voice. Now move from where you are now back to the top of your OP exercise, and ask yourself, "How far did I have to go to get back to the top?" That length of resonance that you just recovered is actually the same amount as how much resonance you lost making the switch to voiced, as that's when we stopped to measure! Do the same thing, except add in a couple sentences read aloud, and you can start to measure how much resonance you drop while speaking. Do it after different amounts of speaking to learn where specifically it begins to fall off. As you can see, this simple trick can be incredibly empowering and frees you of the need to get constant feedback from others. Unfortunately, it only gives you feedback compared to your own range, so you will still need feedback to tell the rough gender of the voice.
If that aggressive, confusing, and long wall of text made you entirely lose track of what I was talking about, maybe you'll have an easier time hearing it in action here
( masculinizing / feminizing ).
The Hard Way: Using your ears
The tougher method to hearing resonance is by learning to separate resonance and pitch with your ears. I've found that this method is really tricky because you need to hear many voices and many different resonance, try and guess which voice is at what resonance, and have some way to check your answer, like a voice teacher or a cheat sheet. This is a process that takes months and months and is a lot of work, though very rewarding. However, I should note that we seem to be especially blind to ourselves. It took me additional months of practice after I started being able to guess the resonance of others, to be able to guess my own resonance. At the moment, I do not have any resources or courses to teach you how to do this, and seeking out other communities may be your best bet.
Homework
Feminizing
For the first two to three weeks,
Homework:
Goals
1. Improve bringing voiceless resonance into voice.
2. Generally build strength and endurance in the voice.
3. Continue pushing limits in the voiceless.Exercises
2x BDLD up and hold (10s)
4x Voiceless "eh" up and hold (10s)
5x Voiceless "eh" to high resonance, switch to voice and read a sentence
Repeat until 5-10 minutes has passed
Aim for three 5-10 minute sessions a day, spaced out by a few hours each
For the next two to three weeks,
Homework:
Goals
1. Generally build strength and endurance in the voice.
2. Reduce aspects of vocal weight as needed.
3. Continue pushing limits in the voiceless.Exercises
2x BDLD up and hold (10s)
4x Voiceless "eh" up and hold (10s)
5x Voiceless "eh" to high resonance, switch to voice and read three sentences
- Strength reading, push as high as you can in resonance and hold briefly
3x Voiceless "eh" to high resonance, switch to voice and read ten sentences
- Endurance reading, push high-ish and hold for longer
Repeat until 5-10 minutes has passed
Aim for three 5-10 minute sessions a day, spaced out by a few hours each
Masculinizing
For the first two to three weeks,
Homework:
Goals
1. Improve bringing voiceless resonance into voice.
2. Generally build strength and endurance in the voice.
3. Continue pushing limits in the voiceless.Exercises
2x LDBD down and hold (10s)
4x Voiceless "puh" down and hold (10s)
5x Voiceless "puh" to low resonance, switch to voice and read a sentence
Repeat until 5-10 minutes has passed
Aim for three 5-10 minute sessions a day, spaced out by a few hours each
For the next two to three weeks,
Homework:
Goals
1. Generally build strength and endurance in the voice.
2. Reduce aspects of vocal weight as needed.
3. Continue pushing limits in the voiceless.Exercises
2x LDBD down and hold (10s)
4x Voiceless "puh" down and hold (10s)
5x Voiceless "puh" to low resonance, switch to voice and read three sentences
- Strength reading, push as low as you can in resonance and hold briefly
3x Voiceless "puh" to low resonance, switch to voice and read ten sentences
- Endurance reading, push low-ish and hold for longer
Repeat until 5-10 minutes has passed
Aim for three 5-10 minute sessions a day, spaced out by a few hours each
But my voice still sounds buzzy, hollow, or fake somehow, is there any way to fix that?
There is! Head to "How do I correct my weight to achieve fullness?" to learn how!
Happy training!