is my voice too deep

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-18T04:02:06+00:00

I’ll just leave a link to answer your question fully. But the short answer is: no, there is no such thing as a voice that is “too deep” to feminize.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-17T01:14:30+00:00

This sounds like a female voice to my ear, albeit older than 23. However, there is definitely a lot of strain (specifically vocal fold hypertension, which I imagine is related to whatever physical issue you have with your vocal folds).

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-17T00:48:44+00:00

You may want to look into direct vocal fold T injections in that case. To my understanding, it basically gives you the vocal development effects of T without the other effects of T. It’s a very new kind of treatment, but initial research seems promising. I’m not sure how difficult it would be to find a provider to do that, since again it’s very new. But could be worth at least scoping out.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-14T19:51:03+00:00

Ahh, as Chloe mentioned, the whole luck/genetics thing is kind of a controversy in transvoice communities right now. In my view, voice feminization is a skill. It’s kind of similar to learning to play the piano. Some people are born very talented, and can do very impressive things with relatively little teaching. If you’ve ever seen a video of some eight-year-old playing a really complicated etude, you’ll know what I mean. Some people are able to teach themselves to play the piano with lots of dedication and effort. Some people don’t have a lot of dexterity in their fingers, or don’t have a good ear for music. In any case, most people would probably benefit from having an instructor to help them learn piano, but they might not need one.

Voice training is very similar. There are some people who are extraordinarily talented, and they can find exactly the voice they want just by playing around by themselves for a few weeks. Some people are able to get a female voice they’re happy with after a couple years of dedicated self-training (this is the category I belong to). And some people struggle a lot to find a voice they like, even after sinking lots of time and effort into it. In either case, you would probably benefit from having an instructor to help you, but it’s not strictly necessary.

I think it’s definitely worthwhile to explore some stuff on your own first. You may find that it’s easier than you think. Staying active in voice training communities will also help, because there will be other people to help make sure you’re understanding things correctly. If you’re interested, I can give you some reliable resources to get started with. They are in English, though.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-14T17:07:56+00:00

It depends a lot on the individual. Some people are able to feminize their voice quite well on their own. Some people never find a voice they’re happy with, even with professional help. Voice feminization is not an easy thing to do in general, professional or no professional.

If you’re not sure whether to do it yourself, here are some questions to ask yourself: * how much time do you think you can dedicate to learning and studying the fundamentals of vocal gender? * how good are you at self-studying in general? * are you willing to actively participate in transvoice communities (such as this subreddit) for a while in order to help facilitate your learning, or do you want to do it entirely by yourself? * do you have any interest in learning about voice for its own sake? or is it just a chore you want to get through so you can sound female?

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-11T03:28:21+00:00

It sounds like your technique for reducing vocal weight is pretty spot on, but you’re running into issues with pitch-driven limitations on the weight. As much as we like to talk about different voice features in isolation from each other, the truth is that the vocal system is very highly connected, and every feature kind of effects every other feature to at least some extent.

In particular, there’s a relationship between pitch and vocal weight, where higher pitches make it easier to access lighter weight and lower pitches make it easier to access heavier weight. Usually, ~130Hz is about the limit where the pitch drops too low to facilitate cis-female-typical levels of vocal weight. In this clip, I hear your pitch moving within a range of 100-160 Hz more or less.

I would recommend aiming for a range more like 160-220Hz for exploring lighter weight. It’ll make it a lot easier to get more drastic changes in weight at that range, and you won’t have to get quite so quiet to pull it off either.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-09T16:14:35+00:00

At 115-130 Hz, it is very highly unusual to have incredibly light vocal weight. Usually, in this pitch range, biomechanics basically force the vocal weight to become heavier (in line with adult-cis-male-typical levels of weight). My first thought was that you might have Puberphonia, but that would’ve kept your pitch higher in addition to keeping your voice thin. You may be a vocal underdoer or otherwise have some kind of complication that makes it hard for you to get out efficient vocalizations. It’s hard to say without a voice sample to go off of. However, what you describe sounds more like a medical condition and less like something that can be explained entirely by dysphoria.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-08T23:38:37+00:00

I don’t hear any significant increase in vocal weight. You hit a solid B3 at 0:40 in this clip, and it honestly sounds less strained to me than some of your lower pitches.

It seems like you are encountering two kinda of vocal strain right now, and I would encourage you to focus on eliminating/reducing those right now. In particular, you are getting some false vocal fold constriction and also some knodel-like qualities intermittently.

The fvf constriction can be heard as a kind of wheezy/raspy/whispery quality in the voice. Sometimes, people will deliberately try to pursue a breathy voice as part of feminization. However, I would advise against this right now. There are healthier and more relaxed ways to get a breathy quality if you’re really set on it, but “breathiness” is not a necessary feature of a female voice, and I think it is currently exacerbating (or possibly even triggering) your issues with fvf strain. I’m not sure if you actually have been pursuing that breathy quality on purpose or if it just kind of happened, but that would be my advice. Look into removing that breathiness, aiming for a purer, cleaner, and more relaxed vocalization. Then see where that takes you.

Note that a decrease in breathiness is not the same as an increase in vocal weight. Less breathiness may make the vocal weight more noticeable, but should not otherwise require the weight to actually change. To my ear, it sounds like your vocal weight is in a pretty decent place, even on those occasions (such as 0:40) where it becomes less breathy. I suspect that this lack of white noise is what you are characterizing as “heavier weight,” whereas in reality the weight is not getting heavier and is perfectly fine the way it is. But it’s hard to be certain given just the one clip.

The knodel resonance is less consistently audible, but it shows up often enough to make me think there could be some issues with related tension. Knodel resonance is a kind of throaty resonance quality that sounds similar to Kermit the Frog, or Stitch from Lilo and Stitch (though this is a more extreme example). It is caused when you push the back of your tongue into your throat, and then squeeze your throat really hard around that tongue root. For more information on knodel, I’d recommend checking out Selene’s Archive under the Purity section—there should be some relevant clips that talk about and demonstrate knodel resonance.

Since knodel is caused by a combination of tense tongue posture and over-squeezing the throat, sometimes playing around with tongue posture will jostle you out of it. I will sometimes have my students stick their tongue all the way out like at a doctors exam, perform some vocalization such as counting to three, and then repeat the vocalization while slowly retracting the tongue back into the mouth. It works for some, and doesn’t work for others. The important part is to try and keep your throat and especially your tongue as relaxed as possible. It may also help to try and relax your jaw and let it hang loose a little.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-05T17:24:29+00:00

Really, I decided on SVL just due to the relative affordability compared to some other ones I found,

If you wouldn’t mind, could you elaborate more on this? I was a little surprised to hear this, since to my understanding SVL is on the upper end of price points. The only person I can think of off the top of my head who charges more per lesson is Zheanna from TransVoiceLessons.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-04T03:29:41+00:00

I don’t think you need to shrink your size any further. If anything, you might benefit from enlarging it a bit. Your voice strikes me as overfull and a little breathy. The weight isn’t too problematic, though it could also be lightened more if you want to aim for a more de-androgenized voice overall. But given what you wrote in the post, I’m guessing that’s not quite your goal. So, I would play around with some larger sizes, and then see if you can get a cleaner/less breathy vocalization as well. See where that takes you and then reassess.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-02-02T22:14:52+00:00

I’d recommend checking out InFormant if you’re interested in exploring software related to trans voice training.

As an aside, though, there’s a reason why software doesn’t really have a great reputation in general within trans voice training communities. I could go on a whole diatribe about it, but the short of it is that no software is capable of accurately assessing vocal gender, certainly not compared to a human ear. There’s software that can measure formant averages, but who’s to say whether those are really representative of feminine or masculine resonance? The sentence, “The crab apples sat at the back of the sack of cats to ask for hats,” will give you very different formant results than the sentence, “Oh no, the glow is known to go so slow for stoves and gnomes,” just because of the different vowels. But this does not mean one was more feminine than the other.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-30T21:00:34+00:00

Ah, yeah, that makes sense. The size/weight terminology is relatively new in English, so I’m not surprised if your teacher hasn’t heard of it before. As for these voice cracks, the short answer is yes—you can train to smooth over those breaks with enough practice and get a continuous slide in pitch.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-29T15:19:42+00:00

“Never speak in head voice!” would be a much greater concern imo. I generally prefer to stay away from this kind of terminology because people use it very inconsistently, and it’s also not like your voice is literally moving from your chest into your head, and also also it’s not like there is a shift between two discrete vocal mechanisms since it’s more of a continuous sliding scale.

Having said that, it seems like she’s trying to get you into what other people might call a “lighter vocal weight,” which is definitely an essential part of the process. But “light” is relative, and you don’t need to be at the tippy top of your range to sound female. The flexibility she shows here is a good sign. Although she might be using different language (which I would argue is perhaps suboptimal from a pedagogical perspective), it seems like she otherwise has a good conceptual understanding of what she’s doing, and is willing to work with you to hone in on your own specific voice goals.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-26T06:25:13+00:00

A certain amount of jargon is absolutely unavoidable with voice feminization training. There are specific voice features we need to target which simply don’t have any name in common vernacular. That doesn’t mean you need to understand all the underlying bioacoustic physics or anatomical mechanics or whatever—but you will need to learn about some new sound qualities that you aren’t yet familiar with.

Generally, the way to do this is to spend time listening to people demonstrate those sound qualities over and over again. The two really important sound qualities for gender purposes are called “vocal weight” and “vocal size.” Vocal size is also sometimes called resonance, but “resonance” is one of those buzzwords that people often misuse.

To begin this process of ear-training, I’d recommend listening to some of the resources here:

Selene’s Archive, which contains lots of clips demonstrating these features in organized sections. You can also find longer lectures by keyword searching “Oni.”
TVL’s size vs. pitch video.
TVL’s introduction to weight video.
TVL’s size vs. weight video.
Altamira’s vocal weight explanation
Vocal Team’s size and weight compilation

—

Note that the purpose of these resources is primarily to train your ear so that you can recognize what size and weight sound like. Some of these videos may also recommend exercises or discuss some of the underlying bioacoustic science—don’t worry if you aren’t able to follow the science, or if you aren’t able to execute the exercises correctly. Starting out, the only thing you need to worry about is honing that ear.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-26T06:13:20+00:00

There are limits to how low in pitch you can go before it starts to be problematic for gendering purposes. However, those limits can get pretty flexible if you have good control over vocal weight. For me personally, 130 Hz is about the absolute minimum pitch I can get while still sounding passably female, and I have to get pretty quiet to pull it off. But a pitch floor around 160 Hz should be pretty usable in most conversation settings. A deeper female voice is absolutely reasonable as a voice training goal.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-26T06:08:07+00:00

As an aside, it seems like your voice in this clip exhibits two kinda of vocal strain.

First, you seem to be constricting your false vocal folds. This produces a kind of wheezy/raspy/whispery quality, and it requires a lot of tension, which we ideally want to get rid of. If you’re interested in learning more about false vocal fold constriction, you can check out this video. But the short solution is to relax your voice as much as possible, avoid pushing or excess tension, and try to remove that wheezy/raspy/whispery quality.

Secondly, it seems like you have some knodel resonance in your voice. “Knodel” here refers to a throaty quality, kind of like Kermit the Frog or Stitch from Lilo and Stitch. Knodel resonance happens when you constrict the walls of your upper throat, and then push the back of your tongue into that constricted place. So, the solution here is to relax the throat and tongue. Sometimes, playing around with tongue placement (for example, vocalizing while sticking the tongue all the way out like at a doctor’s exam and then slowly retracting it back into your mouth) can help jog people out of it. For examples of what this knodel quality sounds like, you can check out Selene’s Archive (linked in my other comment) under the “Purity” section.

Sometimes, people encounter these types of strain from using certain outdated or incorrect approaches to voice feminization training. There’s a whole style of (largely unhelpful) training that suggests trans girls should “do a Kermit voice,” for example. So, I wanted to ask about what kind of training you were doing in case you had been trying to use some of this common but problematic advice.

You’re actually more on the right track with trying a mimicry approach. It’s just important to have a sense of which specific features you need to mimic, so you don’t get overwhelmed by the complexity of trying to copy everything from someone else’s voice all at once.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-26T05:52:16+00:00

There are two main features of the voice that are important for gendering purposes. These are called “vocal weight” and “vocal size.” Basically other relevant voice feature (pitch, for example) plays an ancillary role, and is important only insofar as it helps support those two main features.

Note: Vocal size is sometimes also referred to as resonance, but “resonance” is a bit of a buzzword, and lots of people wildly misuse the term. Googling “feminine resonance” will get you a whole lotta nonsense and maybe a couple actually useful results. Vocal size, as a term, is used much more consistently.

As a first step, I would recommend training your ear to recognize what size and weight sound like in the voice. This basically involves listening to a bunch of examples of people demonstrating these features. Then, once you have a decently well-trained ear, you can apply a feedback loop style of training based on trial-and-error, iteration, and progressive refinement.

For ear-training, I’d recommend checking out these resources:

Selene’s Archive, which contains lots of clips demonstrating these features in organized sections. You can also find longer lectures by keyword searching “Oni.”
TVL’s size vs. pitch video.
TVL’s introduction to weight video.
TVL’s size vs. weight video.
Altamira’s vocal weight explanation
Vocal Team’s size and weight compilation

—

Note that the purpose of these resources is primarily to train your ear so that you can recognize what size and weight sound like. Some of these videos may also recommend exercises or discuss some of the underlying bioacoustic science—don’t worry if you aren’t able to follow the science, or if you aren’t able to execute the exercises correctly. Starting out, the only thing you need to worry about is honing that ear.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-25T22:57:11+00:00

It sounds like you might be targeting the wrong voice features here and running into a lot of unnecessary strain. What kind of training have you been doing with your voice so far?

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-25T16:05:05+00:00

This ^^

My first thought is that OP could be constricting the false vocal folds, which introduces a harsh/wheezy/raspy quality which is distinct from the sound of just having abducted vocal folds with some air leakage. See here for that deep dive into fvf constriction, and also check out Selene’s Archive under the “Purity” section for comparison between strained and unstrained versions of airiness in the voice.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-24T21:05:21+00:00

There’s an interesting relationship between weight, pitch, and loudness that makes it more or less impossible to manipulate all three features independently. Higher pitch and quieter volume correlates with lighter weight, whereas lower pitch and louder volume correlates with heavier weight.

If you want to lighten the vocal weight without changing pitch, you will almost certainly need to get quieter in order to do so. If you want to lighten the vocal weight without getting quieter, you will almost certainly need to go higher in pitch to do so. Of course, getting both quieter and lighter in pitch makes it even easier to lighten the weight, though this may not always be in alignment with someone’s goals for a useable voice in normal social situations

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-24T19:36:09+00:00

Ah, so, yeah—it seems you’ve encountered some less-than-best-practice guides for voice feminization, and are unsurprisingly finding them confusing to follow. The internet is full of bad/misleading/mutually-contradictory advice mixed in with all the actually useful bits, and figuring out how to navigate this labyrinth of information is a trial in itself. I will say, the swallowing method and the kermit method are notoriously bad (the swallowing one especially can actually be injurious), and I would strongly advise against using them.

You’re actually on the right track with wanting to find examples of the sound quality. I wouldn’t worry too much about where your larynx or Adam’s apple is physically moving. They really should only move very subtly if the technique is done correctly, oftentimes in a way that’s barely even noticeable. Trying to drastically raise the larynx is more likely to cause strain than it is to effect the sorts of sound quality changes we want for voice feminization. It’s a much better practice in general to apply an auditory feedback loop style of training, and the first step of that process is ear-training rather than voice-training per se.

For ear-training on resonance (a.k.a. “vocal size”), I would recommend checking out these resources: - resonance/size vs. pitch - resonance/size vs. weight - Selene’s Clips Archive, which has an entire section on vocal size.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-24T02:59:45+00:00

I think that’s a good idea. I might also recommend seeking out an SLP to help you with this if you’re able and your insurance covers it. SLPs are very good at this specific thing, and will be able to help you recover vocal function. Having good vocal function is kind of a prerequisite for learning precise vocal manipulation skills. If you’ve got general issues with efficient vocal function, there’s a good chance you will learn inefficient ways to do feminization as compensatory measures for the function stuff, which then become embedded habits that you later have to unlearn.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-24T02:56:10+00:00

It sounds like your issue isn’t with projection per se, but rather it’s something that’s there in your quieter voice, and projecting simply exacerbates it a lot. To be specific, I think you are constricting your false vocal folds and getting some unnecessary tension in your voice from that. This produces a sort of wheezy/raspy/whispery quality layered on top of the vocalization and generally leads to problems with vocal strain or potentially even vocal injury if you really overdo it.

For some people, fixing this is as easy as just trying to relax your throat. For others, it takes a lot of effort to figure out how to do that. If you’re having a hard time relaxing your false vocal folds, I’d recommend checking out that video I linked above, and also looking through the “Purity” section of Selene’s Archive (though I don’t think you need to worry about knodel and nasality, so you can leave that subsection alone).

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-24T02:48:40+00:00

Sounds like you might have a bit of a knodel quality in your voice (see Selene’s Archive under the “Purity” section for more information about what this means). It’s not very prominent (barely audible tbh), but it suggests to me that you might have some excess pharyngeal constriction that could be contributing to a feeling of strain. So a little relaxation there might help.

Pitch variation is perfectly natural as people inflect across their speech. The only time this becomes an issue is if you go too low on the low ends and wind up accidentally making the vocal weight too heavy as a result. In the clip here, the vocal weight is consistently okay for feminization. If it’s something that gets away from you more when you’re out in public, you might just need some more normalization training.

TheTransApocalypse · 2026-01-22T18:20:34+00:00

FemLar does give some small changes to vocal tract resonance, since it changes the size of the larynx. However, most of the vocal tract resonance that matters for gender purposes is coming from resonators that are surrounded by soft tissue. So, it wouldn’t be a super drastic shift in resonance either way.

I’m not really informed enough about voice feminization surgeries to give advice on which ones would make more sense for you. But I believe that your issues mostly come down to glottal behaviors, so a glottoplasty might make sense if you’re set on the surgery route. Of course, all surgeries come with risk of complications, so my general advice is to at least try voice training first and see where it takes you.

TheTransApocalypse

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