Introduction
( You can skip this bit if you want! )
(Also, if you don't want any explanations, just instructions, visit here: (feminizing / masculinizing)
Voice training is a very intimidating subject with trans people. For transfeminine people and pre-T/non-T transmasculine people, voice training is the only voice training option to getting a voice that doesn't immediately give your assigned gender away. For post-T transmasculine people the same may be true anyways, as masculinizing HRT doesn't always achieve the voice goals many people need. Non-binary people may have the want a masculine, feminine voice, both, or neither, but any way you slice it being shoehorned into your assigned gender's voice can be problematic regardless. So I think it's safe to say that voice training is for everyone!
I have good news though!
As we know it is, voice training is due to a lot of societal and historical reasons, not really something we know a lot about or that we've been able to pin down too well. This isn't helped by the lack of and misinformation from cisgender culture. Because of that, guides that will be recommended to you might be very long with far too much detail and endless exercises. I like to say that this is because these guides are created by the archivists and academics of our communities, to whom every little detail is incredibly important. That's totally wonderful and it helped me a lot, but it's just too much information to get anything useful out of for many people. That's where this guide comes in.
Welcome to Alyssa's Simplified Voice Training!
It's a bit of a mouthful, but driving home the simple nature is really the idea here. This guide is aimed to take all of that wonderful knowledge we as a community have and boil it down as much as possible without losing the results we want.
How it Works
( You can even skip this bit too! )
When we talk about gender in voice, there are really two big groups that things will fall into: Universal Aspects and Cultural Aspects.
Universal Aspects are things that any human from any culture on the planet would recognize as masculine or feminine. In this group are resonance and weight.
Resonance (also called size in some spaces) in trans voice roughly means how a sound changes as it bounces around a space. A good example that you've probably all experienced is the echo of your voice in a big room changing in sound as it bounces and fades. The same thing happens to your voice in your mouth and throat before it leaves your mouth. This is what we want to change! We can do that by changing the shape of the space (your pharynx, or the throat and the back of the mouth) that your voice resonates in. You can think of resonance as our scale from masculine to feminine.
Relevant Article: What's the deal with the larynx and the oropharynx?
Fullness is the idea that the resonance and the weight (how heavy a voice sounds) of a voice like to be in balance. A voice that has too much weight is overfull, and can sound like Mandark from Dexter's Laboratory. A voice that has too little weight is underfull, and can sound like Leslie from The Amazing World of Gumball. Generally speaking, full feminine voices combine a high resonance and a low weight, where full masculine voices will combine a low resonance and a high weight. Weight can be broken down into three things: brassiness, closed quotient, and (in extremes) vocal fry.
Relevant Article: How do I correct my weight to achieve fullness?
Cultural Aspects are things that different cultures might disagree on whether they may be masculine, feminine, or not gendered at all. This might include pitch, vocal fry, musicality, cadence, and more. These aspects are more of what create a "stereotypically" gendered voice, and can often simply be picked up as you exist in the world instead of being trained.
Relevant Articles:
1. Musicality
2. Glottal Attacks and Vocal Fry
These are very simple and incomplete descriptions, but we'll work to flesh out later as needed!
"So how do I do it all?"
( If you skipped the last two headers just follow this! )
Here's a quick and dirty list of what you need to get through in what order.
Start with voiceless resonance:
1. How do I do muscle training?
- Optional Related Reading: What's the deal with the larynx and the oropharynx?
2. How should I manage my training time?
Moving on to voiced resonance:
1. How do I move into voice? (simplified version coming soon)
Then is fullness (weight):
1. How do I correct my weight to achieve fullness?
Lastly is the IRC technique:
1. How do I develop intuitive resonance control?
Optional at the end:
1. Musicality
2. Glottal Attacks and Vocal Fry
How do I take advantage of voice lessons?
I require one thing when scheduling lessons, and that is to pass this short 10 question quiz I've designed. Once this quiz is passed, you'll be emailed a link to the lesson scheduler. If you've joined the Discord community, you'll also be given access to a channel where the lesson scheduler link is always available. If not, be sure to save it somewhere!
I prefer to do the lessons via Discord, but I also offer them via Zoom, Google Hangouts, or whatever your preferred program may be if you are not comfortable with using Discord.
Join the Discord community here!
Or you can email me at [email protected] with any questions!
Who is Alyssa?
That's me!
I am a 24-year-old transgender woman. As of writing, it took me voice training for a year and a half to get to my voice and I have lived fully as Alyssa for the last two years. All my life I've been inspired by and studied computer science. However, as of discovering I was transgender, my life has taken a very different turn. I've always sung to myself, but through my transition, my passion for the voice and all it can do has only grown. I also began to notice through my own struggles and watching others how so many were unable to understand transgender voice training guides, and not well enough off to hire a trainer. As I believe transgender healthcare is a human right, I decided I would step in myself! Between these two ideas, I've come to create this collection of my own knowledge from my own experiences, absolutely and completely for free. I'm now planning to go back to school to study something akin to Speech Pathology to improve my ability to teach here!
Happy training!