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"How do you Make a Tenor Voice Sound Manly?"

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Gsoul82

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Growl a bit? (jk)

Become baritone .:bang:

I'd say that there is nothing in the tenor voice that is inherently unmanly.

If the title said, "more" manly...then that puts a different slant on it cos you can always keep adding more and more of the more "obvious" manly vocal qualities, like weight and boom, until, yep, it is no more a tenor voice.

But I'd say that it is more than just the obvious things that make a voice manly, just as a beard is not the measure of a manly face. There are other more subtle sound qualities that mark a voice as manly and make the tenor voice manly.

Having said that, I can do a head voice that maybe could pass as a boy's voice, but never a woman's.

This is my practice clip I did a while ago for switching between "mix head and chest" voice..

I can go thinner/lighter than that, yet sound more..uhm...mature, lol. So, it is quite complicated.

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The question of making the Tenor voice more manly kind of goes along with the thought "I must be a Baritone because my A4 sounds girly or I flip into Falsetto. Some people already realize that you make a steady transition from "Chest voice" to "Head Voice(falsetto) from around E4 to G#4 to sing a higher range of pitches.   You have to shed some weight in the voice to do this. You need to Let go of  the hold on the TA muscles(Vocal Fold thickener muscles) and Engage the CT muscles(thinning and stretching muscles).  The problem comes in when we try to do this.

Falsetto is when you totally let go of the TA(thickener muscles of the voice box) and your vocal folds are no longer touching each other. This results is a Flutey hollow sound like Mickey Mouse. The sound made when the vocal folds are closing and making contact without TA engagement tends to be like Barry Gibb of the BeeGee's .

Some of the things we mistakenly do to Keep a little bit of a hold onto the TA(thickener) Muscles is to add Twang, Raise the Larynx, narrow the pharynx (the tube made by the back wall of the throat and the Root of the tongue, thin out the vocal cords and push more air. Some of these things may help to produce a higher pitch  but they will give you a thin sound or make it so you Cannot have good control of the vocal folds or tone.

How to make the Tenor voice more manly? Depends on what you have to work with and what you mean by Manly.

A few options are....Engage more TA musculature, Relax the larynx, expand the Pharynx (commonly called "Open Throat" Technique), Hold back the air, darken the vowels(Cover the sound) , back off of the Twanger or otherwise suppress the higher frequency overtones and use resonance for volume not amount of air flowing over the vocal folds.

And , How do we do all of this?   Training and Practice.

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