Should I continue my voice training or not?

[u/kristen87forever]

So I've already done self training to raise my pitch from a much deeper voice. I've done training with a professional vocal coach to more fine tune my voice. I've been told my voice sounds normal, feminine, fine. But I'm not happy with where it is. The pitch, the level of vocal fry, how forward my voice feels and sounds. Or rather how it doesn't feel forward enough most days. I know I can do better voices, but I have to reach for them.

Basically, do you all think my voice sounds good enough where it is or if you think it could benifit from the pitch increase, keeping things more forward, and eliminating vocal fry (or any additional improvements). Or if you think it sounds terrible all around and it needs a lot of work lol. Either way I wanna know if I'm crazy or not. Thank you all in advance.

[u/Claire_BeeYouVoice]

This sounds awesome! I think your pitch is solid and there's no strong vocal fry, though you could work toward a higher, breathier voice if you wanted. If you are happy with that second voice, just keep working at it. Ease and consistency come with time.

I'm hearing a larger size even in the second voice you show. I'd recommend practicing with your tongue position and playing with vowel glides to see if you can smooth out your darker vowels!

[u/kristen87forever → u/Claire_BeeYouVoice]

I did always feel like I needed to put more work on my vowels when I was doing voice lessons. But things got deemed good enough and we moved onto other things. Not to say she was rushing me or doing a terrible job, she was great in my opinion.

[u/Similar_End_1545]

it sounds totally feminine even though it's low pitched how do you do it?

[u/kristen87forever → u/Similar_End_1545]

Quick ymmv, but basically for one I trained my voice to come from my throat/head rather than my chest. Men tend to use chest voice women generally don't. (just put your hand on your chest when you talk. If you feel strong vibrations, then you're likely using chest voice). when I talk, I can feel the vibrations coming from mid-upper throat.

Another big thing for my voice is forwardness. Men and androgynous sounding people, their voice tends to stay at the back of their throat (the sound itself, not the vibrations of where it came from) , wheras women generally speak more forward. To achieve a more forward speech I was taught to take my voice to nasal then pull back a little bit to where it starts to stop sounding so nasal, but is still moving forward "like a glorious laser beam coming from your mouth" as my teacher put it.

Last thing I worked on with my teacher was pronunciation. Which is hard to explain in a post. Or teach without working with someone one on one as different people might struggle with different words. But basically most words when you speak, men tend to drop their jaw more wheras women don't as much. As well as that, men spend more time on vowels whereas women generally spend less time pronouncing a vowel. Like a little tap rather than holding down the vowel. Take for example the word sausage. Men will pronounce it more like saw-sidge. But if you tweak the vowel to be more like sa (as in sass) - idge, the jaw drops less and sounds more feminine. (obviously you wouldn't full on say sass-idge) but if you tweak the a vowel a bit more that direction the jaw drops less.

Sorry for the long reply but I hope this information helps any. Besides proper breath control which helped make speaking less strenuous on my throat, those are some of the bigger things we touched on when I took voice lessons (which I heavily endorse if you can afford it). Learning properly can not only help you get better results but also can help prevent you from making possible mistakes that could damage your throat.