Hey there all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet another quick voice guide about the concept of Vocal Fullness. Hope it helps, leave any questions you may have in the comments and I'll do my best to provide assistance!
Don't fall for the trap of blindly making attempts at changing your voice and then immediately stopping.
Instead, try applying this framework of audiation and course-correction to progress through voice training in a productive way.
Hope it helps!
Hey all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet more musings about the process of voice training.
Today is going to cover some ideas to be more active around the use of your voice in your day to day lives and how to be more aware of how you're using your voice. Hope it helps!!
Hey there all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet more musings about the process of voice training.
Today we talk about specifically why we have to keep an open mind about voice training, and ways to hopefully navigate some of the emotional pitfalls that I commonly see in this field as a voice teacher.
I hope it helps!
Hey there all you beautiful people! Your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with another "quick voice tutorial". This one is doing some basic explorations around vocal size and how to access it.
Feel free to give these sounds a try and post a response of your voice to show off your sound! I'll be happy to try to help in whatever limited capacity I can.
Best of luck! Rooting for yall!!
Hey there everyone, today I wanted to talk about one of the most common complaints I hear from people who have been trying to train themselves how to modify their voices.
A lot of people approach voice modification through thoughts like "raising the larynx" or other anatomically-based observations. While this school of thought may work for some, many coaches such as myself have found that this can also create a lot of strain or tension or constriction which is not ideal for a voice that you're hoping to maintain in the long run.
Let me know what you think in the comments or if you have any questions! Happy to talk about it further :) as always, rooting for yall!
Hey there all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach Chloe here with yet another video, this one showing a really quick drill that I will sometimes use with my students to help them find a more feminine voice called "The Princess Sigh".
Give it a try and tell me what you think!!
Hey all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet another video about some of the questions I see commonly posted here.
Today's topic is regarding ways that you can start to structure your practice around voice training. I'll be sure to update even more specific thoughts in later videos but shoot me any ideas in the comments of specific questions you may have to give me some ideas of what to focus on talking about!
Best of luck everyone, hope this proves to be helpful for you all :)
Hey there all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet another video. This time, we're gonna dive into various demonstrations of vocal size. Try to follow along while you watch and see how closely you can match my voice! Hope this helps some of you out!!
Hey there all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet more musings about the patterns I see through my time teaching people how to modify their voices. Today's topic deals with the misconception that lighter vocal weights are "breathy". Let's dive in!
Really surrendered myself to this instrument huh gang?
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*Insert "the expression" here*
Hey there all you beautiful people! Your friendly neighborhood voice coach Chloe here with another video to hopefully help yall out a bit! This time we're talking about vocal strain, how to hear it, and a quick drill to help you get rid of it. Hope this helps some of ya out there!!
Hey there all you beautiful people.
Today's video is a little softer than my usual. I wanted to offer some encouragement to those of you out there who have found themselves struggling with learning about voice training.
I hope that this can help those of you who needed it. Whatever it is that you're dealing with, I hope you find what you need here.
Happy pride everyone, I'm rooting for you 🧡
Hello there all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood vocal coach Chloe here with a special offer for anyone interested in one-on-one lessons with me.
For those of you that know me, you know that I care very deeply about trying to be a service to my community. Every June, I like to try to discount my prices a bit to both celebrate the month of June with you all, and to try to make my offerings just a little bit more accessible to people that need it. This month I'm discounting all of my packaged offerings to those of you who are in need of some one-on-one training to help get a little closer to your vocal targets. Each of my packaged offerings are as follows:
30-minute sessions:
50-minute sessions:
On top of that, for those of you who may not know this about me, I am also still running my subsidized fund, which allows donations from my Ko-Fi account to give up to one free 30-minute session a month to those who can't afford lessons but still need the help.
If this is something that interests you, I encourage you all to head to my website at cj-voice.net and sign up for a free consultation lesson. These sessions are either used as an onboarding session for further lessons, or if you don't have a budget for lessons at all, can also be used to give you some other resources to learn how to voice train at your own pace as well.
Thank you all for your time and attention to this post, and happy pride month to you all. I have deeply appreciated what help that I can give to the people that I've worked with, and will plan to create more free resources and videos from people to learn from next week. In the meantime, I hope something truly wonderful happens for you all very shortly after reading this post. Have a great day!
Hey there all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach Chloe here with yet another tip about the process of voice training. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about the ideas and importance of perception, active listening, and mimicry, as well as some ways that we can start to train our ears to start to listen more deeply to the sounds that we're hearing both externally and internally. This one is going to be a pretty deep topic, so feel free to post any questions or sticking points that you may have in the comments so I can further enhance the usefulness of this particular post.
Perception and How it Impacts Voice Training:
At its core, perception is how we observe the world around us. There are a number of possible definitions to describe the act of perception, but the one that I find most useful for this one from Mirriam-Webster's definition which states that perception is "understanding or interpretation of physical sensation".
When it concerns voice training itself, the act of listening to the sound of one's voice gives us a perception of various factors of what that person may look or act like. There are numerous subconscious assumptions that we make when we hear the sound of someone's voice, from their gender to their emotions and countless other potential byproducts of insight. Regardless of how factual such insights actually are, to us our perception of most anything feels as real as truth itself until we are proven otherwise. This brings me to my next point that
Perception is Based on a Collective of Subjective Opinions:
When we perceive anything in our lives, we come up with various insights that are entirely based on our own lived-experiences and backgrounds. Take for example the following scenario: you can go to the same movie with your friend and come away with two entirely different opinions about that movie. Not just whether it was good or bad, but the messaging behind the movie or the ways that the movie made you feel are entirely based on your own perception. There is no objective science here that dictates that every single person must gleam exactly the same reaction from something as others, this is part of what makes us human and something that we should embrace.
At the same time, what we can regard as factual information in terms of what we're perceiving usually comes in the form of a consensus of reactions/opinions. While everyone may not come away with the same perception of something, there will still be a majority of thought that occurs as a result of the event (or in this case, sound) in question. This is where we come into the perceptual model of voice training.
How Perception Intersects With Voice Training:
The reason that many of us are here is to train our voices to alter the perception that others have when they hear the sounds of our voices. Specifically, we want to feel affirmed in our identities when others hear the sounds of our voices. This is why the most common form of post in this space are in the form of feedback posts in which people are trying to see how others perceive their voice. This is also why you may get varied opinions under a single post ranging from "this sounds great", to "this isn't the impression I got from your voice and here's why", and everywhere in between.
These perceptions are also a core part of the methodology behind the Gestalt Perceptual Method that were created and popularized by the instructors at TransVoiceLessons (Zheanna and Clover) and have become the main form of instruction by many of us in the voice training world such as Selene Da Silva, Sean and Altamira at the Vocal Team, myself, and countless others.
An easy way that you know that we're using this model is when you hear some frequently-posted concepts talked about in these spaces such as vocal weight, size, fullness, sharpness, prosody, and many other spectrums of sound. This language has formed a framework that expands throughout both bodily-implying and behavioral features of our voices that is also easier for people to understand without having to comprehend the underlying science behind the acoustic properties that we're measuring.
At its core, all of these perceptions are based around our abilities to hear these sounds deeply by engaging in a process known as active listening. While many of us automatically hear and process the sounds around us, the ability to actively focus on these sounds and derive insight as a response involves a more conscious process and thus is a skill that can be trained over time.
Actively Training our Listening Skills is Vital:
It should go without saying that we are trying to fundamentally change the sounds of our voice. This means that the first step that many of you should be taking when introducing yourself to a concept of voice training should be challenging yourself to determine what sounds you're hearing, creating associations with that particular sound or change in sound that make sense to you, and then ensuring that the resulting outcome in your own mind matches that of what is being described/demonstrated to you.
How this process unfolds is by listening to a vocal sample that is being demonstrated and then asking yourself what associations does this sound bring to mind? For example, many people interpret heavier vocal weights as sounding buzzier and lighter vocal weights as sounding more gentle. Depending on the combination of qualities that you're hearing, people can sometimes interpret the sounds of a larger voice as sounding yawnier or dopier whereas people may interpret the sounds of a smaller voice as thinner or brighter. What words you place in the italics may change from person to person, however it is important to take a moment and form these associations none the less. A fantastic resource to start committing to this process is the amazing Selene Vocal Archive that outlines all of this information in audible formats for you to both learn about and more importantly to hear so that you can try to mimic these sounds yourself.
The Importance of Mimicry:
Once you've formed these associations, the next step in the process is to see if you can then mimic the sounds in question and try to model them in your own voice. This is where you may wish to watch my earlier video on qualitative listening so that you can start to look past the automatic emotional impacts of hearing the sounds of your own voice and start learning how to get closer and closer to the sounds you're hoping to achieve.
How to Improve your Mimicry Skills:
Since both active listening and mimicry are a wide-ranging spectrum of skills, it can also be helpful to start working on the accuracy with which one tries to recreate the sounds that they're hearing. A common misconception that I run into as a voice coach is that people are worried that they're "tone-deaf", which is actually significantly rarer than we give it credit for. Here are some ideas of strategies that you can try to help improve on these skills:
Head over to https://www.themusiclab.org/ and take their listening test to determine how accurately you're able to perceive sounds. They also have a tone-deafness test that will help you determine whether you are tone-deaf or not (which statistically only represent 4% of the population).
Record, record, record. We do not hear our voice the same way that others hear our voices because we are also hearing what such sound production sounds like internally as well as externally. In some cases, listen to a sound and try to record yourself recreating the pitch/weight/size of those sounds and see how close your sound is to the sound you're re-creating, then engage with qualitatively determining how your sound needs to change in order to get closer to the sound you're targeting.
Don't be afraid to "search for" the sound after the point of initial production. A constant habit I see in people that I ask to match my sound is that when they don't immediately get it, they stop and try again. Instead of immediately stopping the sound, try to guide yourself into the sound before you stop and see whether your intuition will tell you when you've arrived to the target. This can be a really great way to gradually improve the muscle-memory behind what we're doing to our vocal muscles.
There's no such thing as perfect mimicry, but you can still strive for it anyway. As long as you know how to make your voice higher/lower, lighter/heavier, or smaller/larger that should be enough. For the majority of us, if you're able to hit these overall targets then you will be fine with experimenting further and can achieve measurable results that for many will be satisfactory. That said, don't stop trying to improve! Working on these skills can be really quite fun and exciting if you open yourself up to the possibility of enjoying the process! At the end of the day, however, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
With time and attention and repetition of practice, these skills will gradually become better and more accurate and you'll start being able to deconstruct the features of the sounds you're hearing with greater and greater accuracy. Hope this is helpful for some of ya'll out there, I'm rooting for you!
Heyya folks, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet more musings about the patterns I see as a vocal coach. Today is just a very gentle reminder to not stop exploring and experimenting with your voices throughout your journey. For many of you it may seem like common sense, but I find myself giving this reminder enough that I felt it would be a worthwhile video.
Hope you find it useful! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments :)
Hey all you beautiful people, your friendly neighborhood voice coach here with yet more musings about the patterns I see through my time teaching people how to modify their voices.
Today's topic is intended to help give you an idea of how you can start to train your ear to gather data around the various features of your voice, rather than getting constantly stuck in the emotional feedback loop that can occur when you initially hear the sounds of your voice.
It's called "qualitative listening" and hopefully will help you learn how to focus the responses you experience from voice training into more productive routines. Hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions and I'll do my best to provide clarification or help you out!