The Selfcest Voice Training Guide

Okay, so we can all agree, voice training sucks. Here's how I did it with relatively low effort, and pretty okay results if I do say so myself.

This guide isn't the most rigorous, and neither is it the most comprehensive guide. This guide isn't meant to be an in-depth resource or a wiki. It's meant to be a quick loose collection of things you can do to help get a voice you won't hate and might even potentially like!

This guide is mostly for transfems/anyone who wants to feminise their voice. Masculinising a voice is hard and I unfortunately don't really have the expertise or desire to masculinise my voice.

If you have any questions, feel free to DM me on bsky at @isuggest.selfce.st.

Forget what you know

Let's face it, getting into voice training in painfully difficult. From the moment you find resources, you get hit with a whole load of terms.

Pitch! Resonance! Weight! Vocal fold mass! Phonemes! M1! M2! Plus a whole bunch that I honestly don't know or care to know, you get the idea. All of these terms weigh you down and introduce a ton of cognitive overhead over what should be a relatively simple process.

I know why coaches and communities introduce these concepts. They're important for getting a voice to be exactly how you want it to be. But let's face it. We don't really care about having the specific voice we want, we just wanna get a voice that's good enough to read as feminine.

So, the first step here is to forget what you know. All of those terms that you barely know about a voice? Yeah, just drop them. They make things so much more complicated than they need to be, and they set you up for failure not success.

I'm not gonna introduce you to the concepts of resonance or whatever either. Pitch is pretty much the only thing you need to know and chances are you already know what you need to know about pitch (higher == more fem, lower == more masc, a generalisation of course).

What doesn't matter

It's called voice training. In that, you need to train it. Other places will give you a bunch of exercises and throw you into the deep end to manually tweak your voice to your desired effect. All this will do is serve to make you confused and want to give up on voice training because you'll feel like you're drowning. Don't do this.

Moreso than that, we need to be honest with ourselves. People can get really into the process of voice training and forget that this whole thing is just meant to do one thing, give you a voice. People like to compare shit like oh her resonance is better than mine, or their pitch is better I wish I could be like that. You can be endlessly critical over your voice and you can be endlessly critical over the fact that other people have traits and points that you don't so you train your way towards that forgetting that the whole point of doing all this is to just give yourself a voice. Don't do this.

And part of being honest with ourselves is realising that we are also just plainly human. We can't be perfect, and for a lot of us, voice training is effort. You might be tempted to ritualise voice training. To have a perfect set-up where you can train in seclusion with as many safety nets as you can physically muster in your space. What this does is that it puts voice training on a pedestal, that it's this sacred thing that you must succeed in if not you will never have a voice that you're satisfied with, and what it ends up doing is that it prevents you from stumbling, from making the mistakes that you need to make to get to where you want to be. Don't do this.

What actually matters

Voice training is cringe. It's cringe as fuck. You're gonna be making a ton of squeaking noises that sound like ass and you're gonna sound like someone who's only just learnt how to speak for the first time. This is fine, and you shouldn't judge yourself for it. Even more so, you shouldn't let the people you're speaking to with your new voice judge you for it. Accept that the training is cringe, and moreso, accept that you will fuck up.

Nothing sucks more than being given literal step-by-step instructions on how to do a thing, and then realising that you can't do that thing. Most of the time, it's not actually your fault! It's just shit instructions to begin with. Don't blame yourself that you can't modify your pitch perfectly the first time you start training. Instead, you just gotta understand that people with a ton of experience with this have something akin to an experential blindspot (relevant xkcd). Moreover, it's fine to just be inexperienced. No one expects the college undergrad to immediately be able to write a thesis. You shouldn't expect to nail this stuff first try. Accept that you're inexperienced, it's fine I promise.

Finally, we are, once again, human. We suck at keeping to stuff that's good for you. Think of how often you've given into a craving, or how often you've just decided to not brush your teeth after coming back exhausted from a stupidly long shift or something. We suck at doing stuff that's helpful for us, and we suck at keeping to things that require consistency. The same principle applies to voice training, you're not gonna sustain training every single day and you shouldn't hold yourself to account for missing just one or two sessions here and there. The important thing is that you keep going after you falter for a bit. Accept that you will be inconsistent and move forward with that mindset.

So what?

I've said a lot, but I haven't actually gone into how to train the voice. So here it is. I call it the Character Method, but I don't like giving it a formal name and such so call it whatever you want.

What the method entails is boiling it down to just mimicry. Here it is in steps.

1. Find a voice you like. This can be from popular media. Say you really really like Kafka from Honkai: Star Rail
2. Find a voice line that you think sounds funny or cool. If you chose Kafka, then say you really really like her ultimate activation line: "Good times never last."
3. Repeat that voice line wherever you can and try to nail the mimicry/impersonation. While you're taking a walk, while you're in the shower, while you're on voice chat with other girls on discord, whatever. So long as you just keep repeating that line wherever you can, you'll slowly start to nail the impersonation of that voice.
4. Once you've nailed that one line, start doing all of that character's other lines. Kafka has a whole list of them and whichever character or voice you've chosen should ideally have that too.
5. Eventually, when you have enough of a range, then congratulations, you have a voice. Start doing some more of the classic voice training passages like the rainbow passage.
6. Use your new voice full time.

And that's it! You'll probably be stuck on steps 3-5 for a while, but trust me. Each time you say out the voice, you get closer to mimicking it properly.

This method works because you can be as inconsistent as you want it to be, and you can be as cringe as you want to be and all anyone will know is that you're a nerd who's really into this one character's voice. You don't have to learn why the voice sounds the way it does, just that your voice is now that voice, and that voice is certainly a feminine voice. Even if you miss nailing the voice 100%, so long as you've reached a 'good enough' state, then you're probably gonna be good enough for a fem voice.

All of this sounds really fucking dumb and you might not believe me but give it a shot. It'll get you closer than you think.

The drawbacks

Of course, this method isn't perfect, and there are a couple of cons that you need to be aware of.

First of all, it's really slow. Like really really slow. The benefit of someone who manages to get the Proper Knowledge down can probably get a passable voice within like a month? Fastest I've seen was about there. Doing this will probably get you to a passing voice in like 4-5 months? I don't actually know cause I did this over a couple years without knowing and eventually found out that I had a voice when one of my prior coaches told me to try a voice target/mimic. Moreso than all of this, the more you lax with the method, the longer it takes.

Second of all, this can fuck with your accent. If you're north american, and you pick a british character, you'll get a british accent. This is fine, and you can probably re-train your accent, and training an accent is easier than training a voice. (having a british accent is also fine, and probably really hot, because my girlfriend is british, and her accent is also really hot)

Thirdly, you might just straight up forget lol. Because this is relatively low friction, if you don't remember to do it you really won't get very far. But to be fair, this is also true of like any voice training practice. After all, this is still voice training.

Conclusion

I know I sound like I'm talking rainbows out of my ass with how stupidly easy the method is, but this was what worked for me. I legitimately think that voice training doesn't need to be that complicated, and it should just be that easy. Anyone who says otherwise is setting you up for failure, and the few that have succeded in spite of it is not any reason to keep these old methods around.

But as always, I'm happy to talk about it more. I'm also happy to hear success stories too :D Just drop me a DM and I'll happily respond to it.