Cancellation Policy

If you are looking to cancel or reschedule a lesson, please try to inform me 48 hours in advance and no less than 36 hours in advance. If you miss this 36-hour cut-off, it will count as an unexpected cancellation and you will be required to pay for the lesson.

I get that life gets in the way, so the first time you create an unexpected cancellation we can simply reschedule to a different time. If it happens again, you will be charged the minimum rate for the lesson type you booked. For example, if it was a 55-minute public lesson, you would be expected to pay £30 (if you had already paid more than this, then you may request that any excess is discounted from the next time you purchase from my ko-fi shop). This cancellation policy is necessary. In the event of an unexpected cancellation I am not only potentially losing out on the time/money from the lesson you booked, but it also means that that time slot is unavailable for other people who may have been able to benefit from it.

Know your rights, for example. If you live in the UK then you can cancel your order up to 14 days after paying for a lesson and be refunded, however, you still have to pay for any time invested in you in preparation for that lesson. If you opt cancel within the 36 hour window and do not pay the outstanding fee you will not be able to further use the service.

I reserve the right to cancel any lesson for any reason at any time. In the event that I outright cancel your lesson you will be refunded, depending on the reason for cancellation you may be offered to reschedule instead. I also reserve the right to postpone reschedule a lesson at any time, though of course, in such an event I will try to work with you to provide the most workable solution for both of us.

Late Policy

If a student is more than 10 minutes late to a 55 minute lesson, or more than 5 minutes late to a 25 minute lesson they run the risk of me no longer being there and the lesson will count as an unexpected cancellation. Any lateness will be deducted from the lesson time so please make sure to be there on time.

Recording Policy 

At the start of a lesson you will be offered the option for the lesson to be recorded. If you opt for the lesson to be recorded you should be aware that the recording is now technically available publicly on the internet, even if functionally this is not the case. If you opt for the lesson to be recorded you will be effectively waiving the privacy of this data. This is not to say that we would aim to distribute it without your consent, but that in effect by opting for the lesson to be recorded you are giving your consent for it to be publicly available. When recordings are taken they are done using the Craig discord bot. 

What happens to recordings?

Two things happen: First, I download and process them, at this stage I keep a copy for myself so that I can use it to improve my teaching. This recording may be shared with other teachers so I can get feedback on my teaching. Second, the recording can be put up in the server, when its put in the server, it gets put in a channel that you have control over. You can control who can see it (within the limits of discord's permissions i.e. staff can see it).

Recording will only take place, on my end, if you indicate you would like the session to be recorded. 

Pricing Policy

The service retains the right to at any time modify our prices prior to accepting an order. All prices quoted are given in Great British Pounds and are a guideline of price it is your responsibility to be aware of any fees as they relate to our payment processors paypal or stripe that may mean the prices are higher than they are quoted and to make sure that you are comfortable paying the price at payment before paying. For details on paypal and stripe please visit their websites to learn more. 

Topic Policy

Currently I am only doing lessons on vocal gender modification. As such I consider myself well informed on the topic, if you wish you may also bring up topics outside of this realm but I make no promises that I will be as informed on such topics. For example: I do not teach singing, however, if U had a question about say accessing different parts of your range I may be able to comment on this somewhat but I would not be able to say coach you through singing a song.

1. How long does it take to see results?
   This is pretty variable and depends on a bunch of factors including your voice use, approach to practice and general mentality and a whole host of smaller factors. It also depends on what you want from lessons and how much voice training you want to do outside of that yourself. Some people feel like they have gotten what they want after 1-2 lessons though this is an outlier, other people tend to fall into the bracket of 4-8 lessons and very occasionally people may feel stuck after 10 or more, when this happens it tends to be a case of other underlying factors contributing in a negative way e.g. mental health or privacy concerns getting in the way. If you feel like you are getting stuck with any teacher, including myself it may be a good thing to try out some other teachers and see if they fit your vibe better, different people work better with different teachers and that's totally okay ^_^

2. Will voice training damage my voice?
   For the most part voice training is not going to be harmful, that being said it is always good to be mindful of any potential underlying conditions. Whenever we work together we will aim to be mindful of vocal health, but I am not a medical practitioner so do not expect medical advice from me. I can only guide with the experience and knowledge that I have. There are certain behaviours that we can engage in which may be more fatiguing vocally, in these scenarios we should be mindful to feel out for configurations that feel uncomfortable and then take steps to mitigate this discomfort.  This applies both to people looking to find more masculine or more feminine qualities, at no point in the process should we feel as though it would hurt to sustain a quality, whilst momentary discomfort is rarely a thing to worry about, sustaining something that is vocally fatiguing does make developing permanent vocal issues more likely. 

3. Can I only use one voice?
   Voice training helps us to find more flexibility and control with our voices. This means both that we can maintain multiple voices for different situations dependant on our needs, this is to say there is no need to wait to voice train until you can access other parts of transition, if you need to you can swap between voices or vocal configurations as needed. There's plenty of reasons to want to swap between different vocal configurations whether they are more serious or for fun, so don't feel that you need to worry about getting stuck in one voice or another. 

4. Is voice training permanent?
   This is a bit of a toughie voice training is a slightly use it or lose it skill. When we work on voice training we don't permanently effect the structure of our bodies. (There may be a small caveat here in that people that are vocal under-doers may see large improvements in ease of use if they do actually start using their voices more frequently, and there are at least one or two studies indicating that use of voice can influence vocal fold structure over time there is little in the way of studies looking into this topic so it may not be worth weighing in on too heavily. It seems likely that familiarity in accessing vocal configurations probably plays a slightly larger role here.) We can work to learn and unlearn vocal configurations that feel more or less comfortable for us to use on an every day basis, but this mostly comes down to habituating vocal qualities and avoiding ones we don't want to access. There aren't disadvantages to accessing a wider range of vocal configurations unless its a case of personal comfort, in fact more practice moving between configurations may make it easier for you to navigate your voice.

5. How can I best get prepared for lessons?
   The probably first and best step would be to check out the preparing for lessons tab on the website. When you have familiarised yourself with that it might be time to ask yourself if you want to start voice training. But remember, we can think of 101 reasons to not start, often times getting the ball rolling is the most important step.

6. Is voice training possible for me?
   Broadly speaking voice training is possible for most people. There are of course different barriers that different people face when it comes to voice training. If you're looking to find a more feminine voice then the vast majority of the time you will be able to find a passing voice through training alone. This being said if you have underlying vocal health issues it may be a little harder to find the vocal qualities you're looking for, if you are finding that you get vocally hoarse or are suffering from any form of long term or major discomfort vocally it may be prudent to get checked out by a medical professional before beginning voice training. For people looking to find more masculine qualities it can be a bit of a less well trodden path, depending on a whole host of factors you can expect different results, but if you aren't on testosterone or don't intend to go on testosterone there's no need to throw in the proverbial towel before you start. I've seen plenty of non-testosterone affected people find passing voices, however, if your goals are aligned with say Morgan Freeman there may be some need to moderate our expectations a little. What I'm saying is that different people may see different levels of success but at the very least we can expect to move in the directions of our goals. People who have been affected by testosterone are also very much capable of working on their voices to find more masculine qualities if they would like. For example if you were a transguy who had gone on T but didn't feel like you got the results you were looking for there would be no need to assume that you were unable to modify voice closer to where you'd like it. 

7. How do I train my voice?
   So, the money question huh? Voice training is a skill that we have to cultivate through focusing on improving control, there is no brute force method to achieving the goals we want with voice. Depending on our goals there are a lot of factors to take a look at but I would first recommend taking a look at key factors such as: Acoustic resonance, vocal weight and pitch, maybe vocal weight first if you're transfemme. And then follow these up with things like more socially defined things like intonation word choice etc. Typically speaking these latter factors are less weighted in terms of gender perception, but they definitely can be relevant when we have specific goals in mind.

8. If I have any questions how can I reach out?
   One option would be to use the contact form. Failing that don't hesitate to reach out to me over discord, via my discord: im.adi

9. What if I can't afford lessons? 

If you find the pricing prohibitive then you can reach out to me with me to see if there is a way we could do the lessons at a reduced rate. When doing this please give me a price value.

Alternately you could consider going on the waiting list for sponsored lessons using this form. To find out more about this look at the #gift-a-lesson channel on the discord.

If you're in a position to sponsor a lesson for another person please consider doing so. You can do this through my Ko-fi and you can learn more from the #gift-a-lesson channel on the discord. If you're unsure where to join the discord, see the community tab.