I've given up on finding a woman to sing with to give some variety to my performance. My only hope is a harmonizer to make myself sound like a female or a VST to generate a female voice to sing against.

I've been following this web site for a while now. I spoke to the gentleman who produces all of these sound packages a few years ago. He originally developed them to use in his own productions. I'm impressed.

Realitone products (including female voices)

Do any of you have any ideas yourself for simulating or generating a woman's voice?

Tight underwear.


chas

Sorry Mark, I have a hard time being serious early in the morning. Actually, there are lots of hardware solutions. I have three different 'Voice Processors' that do a fine job of changing your voice into a simulated 'female' voice. I don't sing and am not in my studio now so I can't name them, but one is called FX Live or something like that. When I go down to my studio later, I'll post the names.

chas

If you really want to approach a female voice without any technical gadgets, I can give you a few tips, because I am an intersex woman (born with mixed chromosomes) who suffered from a voice break due to testosterone in my youth and have been trying to get rid of the masculine voice that misrepresents my sex for years.
The most important technique used is not just to try to raise the frequency of your voice (that usually doesn't help much and can be a strain to your voice), but to try to lift up your adams apple (thyroid cartilage) while speaking/singing. This is very tough to learn, but if you succeed, it reduces the resonance of your air cavities, and sounds more female.
For me, this technique is still problematic and not sufficient, so I just underwent a surgery to shorten my vocal chords two weeks ago. It will take 3 months until I might be able to speak loud enough again - that's certainly not something you'd consider...

Mark, if you have a bullfrog voice such as mine, no simulator on the planet will work effectively.

Now, I agree that finding a good, reliable, female singer to work with you is damned near impossible, at least from my experience. My daughter has a fantastic voice, but even splitting the proceeds in half with her, it was still not enough money for her to make a living. And, she really didn't enjoy being on stage. Consequently, she only worked with me for about a week, my convalescent time after eye surgery. When the docs gave me the go ahead to begin lifting again, she went back to being a full-time mom.

Good luck,

Gary

Mark, don't know how you feel about singing/playing with mp3 files, but I believe sites such as Karaoke Version and others have male/female duets with one of the voices dropped out. If you're just using it to add some variety that might work.

Why not a TC Helicon?

John C.

I always pitch shift vocals up 12 semitones in Melodyne, and i take the formant filter and put it on +80-90 Cents. Pretty convincing.

Tony...yep, that's just what I've been thinking (for a while now also). Since I know I'm NOT going to end up with a live human being, I'll get some of those "to add some variety."

I have a few now and they really do the job. I want to sing the duets from the great musicals: West Side Story, Sound of Music, Showboat, etc and I downloaded the Quartet from Rigoletto.

That is something I will DEFINITELY do...get a few more Music Minus Male(but with female) MP3's! Not just for the audience but for my own enjoyment.

This is also what I've been thinking about. A lot of you are using these Helicon type effects. Anyone have any luck in making yourself sound like a woman with any of the other products out there?

This is what I mean...what Bradge is saying here.

My goodness. If we can send a man to the moon, and....you know the rest.

I sometimes shift pitch up an octave and do "Crazy" for comic effect. Better than most of the bimbo female girl would-be singers that I hear.
I also use it to do the high voice in "Bread and Butter", when working with my friend Dean Mathis, one of the original Newbeats.

Don....an interesting appraisal of female wannabe singers!

That's a good idea though right there...the Bread and Butter Song for variety. Since it's not going to happen in my lifetime (finding a female vocalist), I might just start working with a voice processor and do songs like that and songs like Don't You Just Know it (Huey Smith). You can sing unprocessed and immediately bring in the "chorus repeats" as a group. I think! I haven't worked with a harmonizer.

I gave you some tips about lifting the thyroid and a video about various techniques. I would appreciate some short comment about that. If you intend to approach a more female singing, you shouldn’t solely rely on digital processing.

I thought that was quite interesting when I first read it. I'm content with my own scraggly voice these days, although it took years before I could stand to listen to it.
I don't even have a falsetto but wish I could develop it for songs like "Runaway", "Crying", etc.
Larry Henley, who did the high voice in the Newbeats' songs, couldn't explain how he did it; it was just there, but may have indeed been related to a technique such as you describe.

A guitar/singer colleague of mine uses a vocal processor to bring his voice up or down an octave, usually for comic effect but it actually works quite well on some more modern dance/ hip hop that he sometimes does. I don’t think those effects would work well with Great American Songbook material though, but who knows?

The technique with the thyroid lifting doesn't even deal with a "higher" pitch of the voice, that's often overestimated to make a voice more female. Resonance and overtones are equally important.
This woman born with male body characteristics manages the technique extraordinarily well, but I think she had good prerequisites and not an extremely male voice in the beginning... I admit, probably too much hard training necessary just for the purpose in question here...