Lung Capacity

What do I mean by lung capacity and how is it different from breathing techniques and all that other stuff I harked on about before?

• It’s generally defined as the maximum amount of oxygen you can use, or have in your lungs at any one time.
• It’s generally measured by scientists in millilitres per kilogram of bodyweight per minute, but it’s more commonly given in litres per minute.
• The average male athlete has a lung capacity of approximately 3.5 litres per minute, though this is by no means near what human beings are capable of. The average adult human can hold 6 litres of air in their lungs, it’s just that they don’t use all of that space in normal breathing. A notable exception to this rule is Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain (pictured below) who is documented as having had a lung capacity of 7.8 liters per minute.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Miguel_Indurain.jpg)

This has fairly obvious applications for singers as the larger your lung capacity, the easier it’ll be for you to hold out notes and keep singing for longer without taking breath. But what is it that stops people from maximising their lung capacities? 

Without getting too technical, there are two things that can potentially restrict your lung capacity other than just not being able to breathe in as much air. Firstly, the oxygen itself actually needs to make it to the muscle tissue that requires it (this is less of a concern for singers than it is for athletes) and secondly, the muscle tissues that get the oxygen need to be able to convert the oxygen they receive into energy. Failure to do both of these things can result in a reduced oxygen capacity, and this has obvious consequences e.g. increased likelihood of getting stitches while exercising, shortness of breath etc..

Now you know what it is, how can you improve your lung capacity?

The most common ways of improving lung capacity are all based around doing either normal cardiovascular exercise e.g. swimming, or intense sessions exercise for a short period (usually around 5 minutes), then taking a short break to recover and then doing it again.  All the various kinds of interval training are a very good example of this.

 However, given that not all singers will want to commit the time and energy required for doing loads of regular exercise, I’ve detailed a relatively pain free exercise I use regularly that should allow you to increase your lung capacity below. If this one isn’t to your liking, there are plenty of different approaches to achieving a larger lung capacity out there, all it takes is a quick google search to find one that works for you.

Mississippi Meditation Exercise

1) Sit down, put on some relaxing music or a favourite album. Not TV or anything visual, it’s too distracting and detracts from your ability to do the exercise as it draws too much attention.

2) Close your eyes, meditate and sit for 10 minutes without any specific goal, breathing through your nose and out your mouth, steadily and regularly.

(http://www.buteykocourses.com/uploads/76035/images/194932/nosepower.jpg)

3) While still relaxed, and without any over exertion or hyperventilating, take in a deep breath and hold it. Begin counting. Obviously, a regular count is what’s needed for the purposes of the exercise  –I find using “1, Mississippi, 2, Mississippi, 3, Mississippi” works for me but use whatever works for you, as long as you can ensure your count is regular, otherwise you lose the point of keeping the count.

4) Make note of what number you reached when you could no longer hold your breath.

5) Repeat regularly, keeping records of how well you did. I usually do this exercise 2 or 3 times in one sitting with ten minute gaps in between, as I find that I do better on the 2^nd and 3^rd tries. Over time you will notice a gradual increase in the number you reach, and this should directly translate into an increase in your lung capacity.

A couple of examples of how to translate increased lung capacity into songs…

The Lightbearer- Aeternum

Listen from 1.34 - I had no idea what to do for that section of the verse and decided a long scream would be cool, and my increased lung capacity lets me do it in between the verses just as easily live, assuming I haven't been abusing my throat before the show.

Darkness It Shall Be- Marduk

Just listen to what Legion's singing, and try and see where he takes breaths. It's mindblowing, especially given it's in a live situation.

For the more academic amongst you, this article is an interesting examination of lung capacity in singers and provides a good source for finding further reading: 

 http://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/52595/1/soa007_024.pdf

-E

What to look for in Youtube tutorials? The good, the bad, the ugly.

Guess who’s back?

Everyone knows that Youtube is a vast, boundless source of information and funny video clips of cats. Furthermore, anyone that’s into metal will have likely encountered the widespread fashion of vocalists doing videos titled ‘How to scream/death growl/do metal vocals’. They are a quick and easy way of getting information about performing vocals for all you budding Corpsegrinders out there.

However, the vast majority of them are utterly useless.

So, I figured I’d put together a quick guide telling you what to look for from vocal tutorials and also give an idea of the things to avoid. I didn't use tutorials when I learnt how to death growl, so I kinda stumbled onto these kinds of videos after I could already do it. The amount of videos out there is almost infinite, so I've just taken the first five I found on a youtube search and split them into good, average and bad and then given bullet points telling you why!

(N.B. My analysis of these videos has nothing to do with musical style, or how good the vocalists actually are- just with their teaching styles)

Good

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6e1-Sc6BfM

Alxxxs  (Broadly death metal, but gives ideas about other styles as well)

-Nice and simple without a one directional response to vocals, and can actually ask her questions if the need takes you.

-She says its not step by step, but it kinda is. The technique breakdown and actually showing you how to craft a sound is still there.

-She demonstrates an understanding of style analyses, and the idea that vocals and the tone you choose is very much genre relative but still remains open minded about applying the ideas.

-Deals with wrong technique and hurting yourself, as well as people warning you off. Which is something not many people do deal with, but something you’re going to encounter a lot of.

-We differ on the false chord thing, inhales and all that jazz. But all the same, at least she deals with it in a direct and clear way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFeYs2Fee2Y

Aaron Squires (Shagrath-y sound)

(Uses a completely different technique to me, but as a tutorial it’s pretty good)

-Clear and easy to understand.

-Tells you what’s going on inside his throat a little bit.

-Actually breaks down his technique into graduated steps and gives you a starting, middle and end point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stHvPsSbvqo

Blix (Burzum-y sound)

- There’s technique analysis. I’m not going to go into this further.

-Again, Blix gives you a step by step process to achieving his sound and breaks it down a little.

-Has evidence of his regular singing, and loads of other stuff (always a good sign, as you wouldn't trust someone to teach you guitar unless they had evidence they were good, why should vocals be any different?)

Average

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp2Cr5Y-wLI

Som Pluijmers (Ex-Cerebral Bore, Slam Death Metal)

(the good)

-Deals with in depth throat biology, which is always good (what she’s doing is explaining the false chord idea as using muscles, which is basically is)

-Emphasis on practice and repetition, starting small and dealing with basics (e.g. breathing and diaphragm). Rome wasn't built in a day.

-Very realistic view of how people start (I started in almost exactly the same way she did) along with recordings of her 13 year old self.

-She addresses maintenance of your voice in the long term

(the bad)

-Saying hurting yourself at the beginning is ok. This is not a good attitude to have, as if you start hurting yourself, you’ll keep hurting yourself.

-She only really deals with Slam technique and achieving one sound, not necessarily a bad thing but bear in mind that this doesn't apply to everything!

-No real breakdown of how she actually does what she does in her throat- just lots of her achieving growls immediately.

Bad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjXQyeYz19U

Dopey TheDopeSmokenKlown – (Broadly Slam and Deathgrind)

-He talks more about taste, different genres and how much various bands suck rather than about technique and performing vocals. Which is never a good sign.

-Advocates hurting throat. Just… no. What he’s getting at is vocal scarring, which is a thing you can do, but it has consequences.

- He’s less than accurate in his go-to-techniques. Like with Som above he tries to teach by just going look and then growling a ‘finished product’, without going into how he got there. However, at various points he can’t even hit his default vocal and has to think about it and re-try. No one who’s any good should have to do this when doing a style they use regularly.

-“Don’t think you can learn it” – Yes. Yes, you can. If no one could learn, no one would even be able to do anything. If it can be done, it can be learnt.

-His style of presenting is arrogant and stand off-ish. Not a vocal thing, but it’s generally nicer watching videos where the guy talking to you isn’t really negative.

All in all, the key theme is to look for teaching of techniques with developed/graduated examples rather than just growling and saying broad generalised things and avoid videos where keyboard warriors are talking nonsense about stuff they don’t know. Also, remember they're not the be all and end all of information on vocals.

-E

7 Myths About Metal Vocals And How They’ll Affect Your Experience As A Vocalist

Ladies and Gentlemen of the internet,                Today I’m going to deal with, and in some cases dispel, the 7 biggest lies, myths and misconceptions about metal vocals and how they’ll affect you as a vocalist. It’ll be a relatively short post, but one that it’s essential to understand the lessons of. Most of this is my opinion and the result of my experience, so it is wholly biased and subjective, so take it as you will.

1) The first and most common comment you will hear, everywhere and unrelentingly is that “it’s just noise”. This can be a massive disadvantage as it will mean that the majority of people (yes- even musicians and music fans) won’t actively be listening to what you’re singing, and to a point, don’t really care. As long as there is something on top of the music most people are happy. So, my advice would be don’t expect too much respect from the majority of people.

2) It’s also a massive myth that most people actively listen to vocals. Yes, they listen to the general tone for about ten seconds to get an idea, but beside that they don’t actually pay any attention in my experience. People care far more about what you’re doing on stage, your persona and what you’re wearing. It’s sad, and shallow but true. And the first lesson I ever learned about being a vocalist. If you look right, appear confident and get the basic jist right, often your own band won’t notice if you’re improvising or lost, let alone audience members. So don’t panic if you’re not totally pitch perfect or you forget a line here or there.

3) There are a million different vocal techniques, and everyone has a different voice. When you add this to the millions of different subgenres that exist at the moment, it basically means that in some way, whatever noise you can make is appropriate to some kind of music, and consequently, can’t be considered wholly bad or wrong. And while every genre has its own trademark expected sound, there is always someone somewhere that veers from tradition and uses a different tone. Most of these people tend to do so because they can’t do anything else. There is a massive amount of diversity out there, and no matter how bad you think you are, there’ll always be someone somewhere worse who everyone respects and thinks is awesome.

4) This one is simple- volume is not the same as tone or technique, and it never will be. Never sacrifice tone for volume. It’s what microphones and PA’s were built for.

5) Another common misconception is that there is no melodicism or tonality. This in itself is just wrong. If one stops to consider it, even just doing the same scream on two different days will never sound exactly the same, so the idea in itself is totally moot given the myriad of different things you can do with your throat to create different kinds of highs and lows or it being a fairly simple matter to pitch growls in scales.

6) If you trawl through youtube videos, you’ll eventually stumble across what is referred to as “cupping the mic” and how it’s a massive sin. The reason people do cup the microphone with their hands is to increase the volume of the growl that reaches the microphone, much like when children make a cone out of cardboard and use it as an acoustic loudspeaker. I’m fairly outspoken on the whole issue really (as if you need to cup the mic, you still have a lot of practicing to do) but many prominent extreme vocalists do cup the mic all the time, and have massive amounts of fans and imitators, so don’t rule it out if you’re struggling or you just want to get going- but remember: people will judge you. Well, anyone paying attention anyway.

7) Lastly, there’s the idea that drinking and smoking somehow make your voice better in a permanent way. They don’t, in fact, given their proven biological effect on the vocal chords, they’re both really detrimental to vocal performance. They do affect your voice, and can make it easier to get certain tones, but don’t think that they’re a magical solution to hitting that new low you’ve been trying to get for months. On the other hand, they’re not going to instantly kill your throat or anything drastic, and their effect happens over a long period. The best advice I can give is if you must do it, do it in moderation.

-E
Tomorrow's post: Inhales vs Exhales

Breathing, and why it’s not just a thing you do to keep living

Sup motherlickers,

    Today’s post is centred around another aspect of vocal performance that I think everyone should consider in at least a little depth: breathing. And yes, I know, everybody does it every day and they’re perfectly good at it. But breathing for vocal performance is a very different kind of animal, because often your normal breathing won’t accommodate the kind of vocals you’re trying to pull off or you’ll have about a second to breathe before holding out a twenty second long scream, so you really have to be in control of your throat and lungs and know song structures down to a tee. Besides this there are many advantages to being in control in terms of your breathing. Once you’re totally at home with your lungs, you can be a lot more precise and interesting with vocal patterns and do stuff that other people wouldn’t be able to pull off, completely ignoring the potential for ego massaging and stupidly long screams that will boggle audiences’ minds.

I’d just like to take a moment to emphasise that this article actually has very little to do directly with extreme vocals, but a LOT to do with them in terms of indirect improvement, so like, you can feel free to ignore this at your own leisure, but if you take a lesson or two from it and incorporate an exercise from it into your practice routine or even just get a better idea of how breathing works and consider it in terms of your performance it will improve your vocal abilities no end. There are countless sources of breathing techniques to be found online via a quick google search (most of which are based around the same core techniques), but I’ve never bothered with them at any length as I already know the basics of what I need to, and the exercises I’ve either stolen or worked out over the years work for me. If you’re ever feeling fruity, or want to particularly focus on improving your breathing technique feel free to wade through the vast amounts on breathing exercises you can find on the internet. This post will cover the basics of breathing as I understand them and lay out some exercises I myself do in conjunction with improving my own abilities.

 (http://www.merckmanuals.com/media/home/figures/MMHE_04_038_03_eps.gif)

What follows is a rudimentary run through of what happens when you breathe in and out, as best I can explain it and you need to understand it given the context. It may not be the most interesting thing in the world, but it’s worth considering if you’re going to take the breathing exercises seriously. As you breathe in, your diaphragm (an elastic muscle stretched across the bottom of your ribcage) contracts- drawing the air around the front of your mouth down through your throat and trachea into your lungs. As the air goes into the lungs, so that they can absorb the oxygen out of the air, the organs increase in size and volume because of the air they are being forced to contain. This, in turn, forces the intercostal muscles and the ribcage to be pushed outwards, expanding the overall size of your chest cavity. Then, once your lungs have absorbed the oxygen or you force the air out in a different way, the chest cavity shrinks in size, the diaphragm relaxes and the air in your lungs is expelled as they shrink in size.

The exercises I am about to detail focus on changing the way your automatic breathing works, as you breathe a lot differently when you’re not thinking about it directly and focusing on other tasks (like, for example headbanging or interacting with the crowd). This is because conscious and unconscious breathing are controlled by different areas of the brain and are basically unrelated, so as soon as you start thinking about what you’re doing, you’re basically using an entirely separate part of your brain.  I’m still working on changing my unconscious breathing to work wholly correctly during a gig situation, and I’ve been working at it for a few years, so don’t expect it to come massively easily or immediately. Though, the benefits are noticeable within a fairly short time frame if you practice these exercises regularly.

What follows are the three breathing exercises that I use on a regular basis to either expand my lung capacity, make breathing during songs come to me easier on an unconscious level or just focus a little more on building up on my torso’s collective muscle memory.

The metronome exercise

This exercise requires the use of an online metronome, it’s fairly easy to find one online, and any old one will do as long as the metronome is in time. The exercise itself consists of taking in a breath through your nose exclusively for a certain number of beats, holding your breath for a certain number of beats, then expelling air over a prolonged period for a certain amount of beats.

When I do this exercise it usually goes in a 1:1:2 ratio, though if you’re feeling confident go for 1:1:4. So an average exercise for me nowadays is take breathe in through your nose (and only your nose) for 3 or 4 beats (I’m not usually that precise with intake, because I’m never precise during a live situation), hold it for 6 beats and expel an actual scream for 10 or 12 beats. This doesn’t actually push me at all- but it’s a good thing to do regularly, as doing it regularly will expand your lung capacity and enable you to do longer screams and increase the amount of control you have over your breathing. I mean hell, nowadays I can belt a scream for somewhere between 30 and 50 seconds depending on how much I’ve been drinking that particular week. This is all down to practice and endurance, so the more you practice, the better you’ll become.

Sing songs without breathing

This isn’t a structured exercise, more something I’ve done over the years for amusement that I’m pretty sure has a benefit to my vocals on any number of levels. Pick any old song that uses extreme vocals. Sing through it as best you can, without breathing in at any point and just holding your breath during the gaps. You will be forced eventually to take a breath. In particularly intense songs, this can be inside the 20 second mark, with others it will be 2 minutes into the song. Doing this pushes you to really see where the most important places for breathing occur throughout the song and memorise them, as well as building up your lung capacity in an indirect way.

Laying down and focusing on stomach breathing

The next exercise is designed to make you focus on breathing/expelling air from your stomach and not your throat (this is a massively common piece of advice from vocalists, whether they embrace it themselves or not). In theory, the more you focus on doing it consciously, the more naturally it will come to you unconsciously and will make the whole performing vocals shindig a lot easier.

Lay down flat on your back. Put your hands just a little bit above your belly button and below where your ribcage ends. Breathe in through your nose for 5 seconds. Feel which muscles in your torso are working, and how it feels like it’s actually your stomach that’s expanding (if it doesn’t then you’re doing it wrong). Hold your breath and make sure no air is expelled for 10 seconds or as long as you can hold it, then expel the air in your lungs slowly over a period of 5 seconds.

Again, this exercise is fairly indirect, but it helps to focus on the breathing technique to be used on stage, as it maximises the amount of air you take in and makes fully sure you take it in with your diaphragm. 

(http://i2.squidoocdn.com/resize/squidoo_images/250/draft_lens4617962module33154212photo_1242174201belly_breathing.jpg)

In conclusion, I don’t use all of these exercises regularly, as I’m fairly good with my breathing technique. At least I think I am, and I can pull off anything I write without particular focus on breathing. My general advice would be “don’t be a pussy”. If I can do it, you can. I’m asthmatic and if pushed can belt a scream longer than any vocalist I’ve met in the flesh, and this is without any kind of regular breathing exercises. The key thing is while you’re learning to do vocals, practice regularly, maybe even get a few lessons from a classically trained singer (as I intend to do, given I know I could improve in this particular area), and don’t give up. At the end of the day nobody respects Chris Barnes because he can hold a scream, people love him for the tones he gets out of his throat, so don’t sweat it if you can’t get a particularly long scream or you find the whole breathing thing difficult to get to grips with. Just keep at it, and if all else fails, listen to the professionals, some of them aren’t that good at it themselves!

-E

Tomorrow’s post: 7 Myths About Metal Vocals And How They’ll Affect Your Experience As A Vocalist.