Around video eight, the comments started opening with "Thanks sir" and "Great explanation bro." It happened often enough that I stopped thinking it was random.

Why it bugged me more than it should have

It wasn't offence exactly. It was that I'd been told my whole life I have a "low voice for a girl," and I'd quietly started pushing it even lower on recordings because I thought it sounded more confident. Apparently it now just sounded like somebody else.

My partner said I sounded like me. My sister said I sounded "like a podcast." Neither answer helped me decide whether to change anything.

A listener with no opinion

I took a thirty-second clip from the flexbox video and ran it through the voice gender detector on voice-rater.com. You record or upload a short sample and it tells you which way the voice reads and how strongly. I treated it as one more pair of ears, not a ruling on who I am.

The flexbox clip leaned clearly male. Then I recorded the same paragraph the way I'd explain it to a friend sitting next to me, no "presenter voice," and that one came back close to the middle, tipping slightly female.

So the issue wasn't my natural voice. It was the voice I put on when the record button turned red.

What I changed

• I stopped dropping my pitch at the start of every sentence. I'd been doing a radio-host dip without noticing.
• I moved the mic about a hand's width further back. Close-up mics boost the low end, and mine was almost touching my chin.
• I record mid-morning now instead of after a long workday, when my voice is tired and gravelly.
• I say "I" and "let's" more. Reading a script stiffly made me flatten everything.

Three videos later

The "sir" comments haven't vanished, but they've dropped to maybe one per video, and someone wrote "her explanation of grid areas finally clicked for me," which made my week for a silly reason.

If you record tutorials and the way people address you surprises you, try two takes, one in your presenter voice and one in your normal voice, and listen to both before you assume anything about how you come across.

Written by the Voice Rater Team