[0:11]Hi there, it's your girl Z from Transvoicelessons.com. Today we are going to talk about where to begin in voice formation. This video is intended for complete beginners, but it will be helpful regardless of your proficiency level. If you felt confused, overwhelmed, aimless or lost, this video is for you. So, let's get started. Part one, the beginning. Voice is all about understanding what to listen for and what to take action towards. By listening first and listening carefully, we can better process our experiences and navigate towards our goals. There are two primary keys we need to listen for at first. So, let's listen carefully. Key number one, pitch. Let's listen to the sound of pitch moving around.
[1:16]You hear that? That is pitch. It's the sound of high and low. It makes things sound like they are rising or falling. Most people are already aware that there is a difference in pitch between maculine and feminine speakers. Maybe you've even tried to raise your pitch already, but instead it made you sound strained or uncomfortable. Maybe you've even heard me say that pitch isn't that important and everyone spends too much time on pitch. Why is this? Well, you see, there's actually another element going on that's even more important for us to listen to it first than pitch. But it's a lot less obvious. So let's go ahead and take a listen to this other thing. Key number two, vocal. So now we're going to be listening for different amounts of vocal weight. It sounds like buzziness or less buzziness. Let's take a listen.
[2:26]Here that sound? It's like really buzzy or less buzzy that is vocal weight. It's the sound of intensity and forcefulness. It makes things sound buzzier and more dense. It's generally a masculine vocal queue and it massively influences how our pitch behaves. See, it's not that we care about weight or pitch by themselves. It's that we care about the interaction between these two things. The first fundamental goal in voice femininity is to sound relaxed, comfortable and reduce the effort that it takes to get to higher pitches. With too much weight, this pitch area will feel strained, unsustainable and it will sound too harsh. If we get to a higher pitch with a whole lot of weight,
[3:17]1, 2, 3. It's going to be very difficult for you to maintain that. It's not going to sound very feminine. It's going to stand out as being labor. So we care about the interaction between pitch and weight. And this is the best best place for beginners to start.
[3:35]So, at this point, we've talked about two different things. weight and pitch. By now you should loosely understand the concepts and loosely understand what it sounds like. Now, the next important question is, what actions do we need to take? If we're just getting started in voice formation, what is the simplest most straightforward thing we can start doing? Okay, so to help you get started taking action. Let's go ahead and do a little bit of basic pitch mimicry. This will be helpful for us just to get our hands dirty with sound. So, do your best and try to mimic along with me.
[4:26]So I hope you were able to match my pitch without much difficulty. The reason we did that is because we just did one of the hardest things in the entire process. We took action. So that was just some basic pitch exploration and that's honestly amazing to do. If you're just getting started, you can just play with your voice. Just move your pitch around and have fun with it. Now, similarly to the pitch mimicry exercise we were doing a moment ago, I also want to do some really basic weight mimicry. Because we just want to make sure that we can get the real basics out of the way before we get to these exercises a little later. So I'm going to make some sounds and I want you to make them back to me. We're going to start really light as if we're trying to like we're like trying to like talk to like a cute little kitten like that, right? And then what we're going to do is we're going to try and like sound a lot like angrier. Okay? And if you hear that, there's a significant difference in the intensity, the liveliness and most importantly, the buzziness between those two sounds. Let's try and do that again. So this time we're going to make a light sound like so. Almost like a yawn. It's very smooth. Notice how it's not very buzzy. And now we're going to try to add weight.
[5:52]So that is what it feels like to make basic movements of weight. The intensity, the livelness and most importantly the buzziness changes. Now, in order for us to really get some value for femininity, now we need to think about how pitch and weight work together. So, I'm going to give you three simple exercises to play around with to help you understand how pitch and weight influence each other. Exercise number one. Humming and sliding. So, let's all go ahead here and make a heavy and low pitched humming sound.
[6:31]You should be able to feel that it's kind of buzzy. You should be able to feel that it's probably lower than what you want. And then we're going to try to move it up and pitch so we end up with a very heavy and high kind of sound. Like so.
[6:50]Do you hear that gets louder? It gets more forceful, it gets more intense. That's what it sounds like if we keep heavy weight while we go high. Now let's try and do the same thing, but reduce weight while we go higher.
[7:34]Then if we start to find the quality that we're looking for, that lighter and higher sound, we can try to casually shift it into speech and see if we can maintain it. The goal of this exercise is to contrast the difference between being heavy and going higher and being light and going higher. They have very different sounds and very different feelings. So we would want you to play around with this and to try to find a higher, lighter and cleaner sound. Exercise number two. heavy heavy light. We're going to start at a lower pitch and a much heavier sound and we're going to try and incrementally step up and pitch like so.
[8:16]Then we try and do it again, but this time the third one we make light.
[8:30]The purpose of this exercise is to contrast two heavy sounds with a much higher sound that lightens out. It'll be increasingly harder for you to go higher in pitch with that heavy sound. So try to think about making that third sound very comfortable, very easy, very relaxed.
[8:54]Make sure you go high enough as well. Sometimes people who don't have a lot of vocal experience will will do something like this. And we're not looking for that. We're looking for a much bigger contrast between the two qualities. Let's go ahead and take a couple more lessons to this exercise.
[9:24]Exercise number three, using a pitch tracker and experimenting. A pitch tracker like this shows us what our pitch is doing. And for that reason, it's extremely valuable for people who are less musically inclined. You can do all of the previous exercises that we've already done while watching a pitch tracker and that would be honestly great for you. But what we're going to do this time is we're going to try and start low and heavy. And we're going to try to bring our pitch up until it kind of feels like it gets stuck a little bit. Like And not everyone's going to get stuck there, but a significant majority of beginners do. And if you're part of that group that gets stuck there, what we're going to try and do is we're going to keep going up to that point. And then when we get to that point, we're going to relax and try to go higher like so.
[10:32]And if we start to get that sound, that lighter, higher sound. Then we're actually going to try and go back down and keep it light. Like so.
[10:45]And now you hear when I go down, it doesn't sound so heavy or intense or masculine. It actually sounds like I'm reaching the bottom of my vocal range, but it's only like there, you know? So I'll do that same thing again from the beginning.
[11:10]And I can't really go any lower than that at that point, unless I get heavier. So this is an amazing exercise for everybody to try out. Exercise number four, creaking and exploring different amounts of vocal weight. Now, this exercise is a bit of a bonus, and unless your creep is very relaxed, which some beginners can just do right away, Then it's probably not going to be very useful for you. So we're going to start with this relaxed creek.
[11:41]And we're going to shift from that into both a heavy and light sound to contrast and compare the differences. So I'm going to go ahead and do this.
[12:06]It feels incredibly relaxed. It feels incredibly low effort, and it really allows us to physically feel the difference between the two sounds.
[12:31]The most important thing about this exercise is that you're starting from a relaxed and stable creep. So we don't want any That's not a stable creep. We want something relaxed. And then try to move that heavier and lighter and see how it feels. Good luck.
[12:54]Now after you explore these exercises and you're finding a quality that's lighter and more comfortable of then what you should try and do is work on speaking fluid with it. Like so, one, two, three, four. It's okay if it sounds like this at first. Ah, one, two, three, four, five. The key is that it's light and comfortable and fluid. So after you use these exercises and you start to find this quality, try to start utilizing it. That's where we get the usefulness out of it. We experiment because we're trying to create a wide variety of possible options and experiences. Then out of those options we gain, we can start to work towards what sounds and feels best for us. As a general goal and feminism, we're seeking a clear, pure, full, light and higher voice during these exercises. If we wish to addness, grittiness or operate at a lower pitch, those are all totally fine and solid aesthetic options, but it helps in the beginning to work towards this very clean kind of target. It makes us less prone to making mistakes. Remember that the difference between a learning opportunity and a mistake is whether you are aware of it or not. If you're doing something wrong and you're not aware that you're doing something wrong, that is a mistake. If you're doing something wrong, but you know it's wrong, that is a question and a problem to solve and those are some of the most exciting moments in vocal development. After exploring a range of different sounds and finding something close to the target, work to casually and fluently speak with that quality. So, let me show you all exactly what my voice sounds like if I completely remove my resonance modification, but I keep my weight and my pitch the same. Um okay, so it's like this, like do you hear that? Like it's very smooth, it's very pure, it's like comfortably operating at higher pitches. This is actually what a feminized vocal foundation sounds like. with no smaller vocal tract. So, like if we took like an average sisfin voice and then we expanded the vocal tract, you'd get a sound that's something kind of like this. It's totally fine if you sound like this at first because our first priority is making sure that your pitch is comfortable, that your voice is smooth and that your speech feels balanced and sustainable. Often times, people may play with weight and pitch, but get frustrated because they hear the voice is still off. There is more work to be done then just pitch and weight modification, but it's definitely where you'll want to get started at first. It's got good pitch, it's got good weight, it's very comfortable and then I can just change the resonance on it in order to get the sound quality that I'm looking for.
[15:48]In femininity, we need to avoid confusingness for reduced weight. Being breathy does reduce your weight because it makes you sound less buzzy, but it also introduces unwanted nose. So, let's listen to some examples ofness versus our target sound.
