A Beginners Guide To Dynamics In Extreme Vocals

and here's another video of me talking nonsense, enjoy.

-E

Mouth Shapes in Extreme Vocals Video

So, I've started doing videos. Mostly this is to teach people, and only a little bit because I couldn't be assed typing stuff out. I promise.

and yes, I realise the frame it chose to use as the default picture is amazing.

-E

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.

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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. 

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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.

Warm Ups & Starting Rituals: A Pointless Waste Of Time Or Totally Indispensable?

Hail! Denizens of the internet!

          Today’s post is centred around, as the title states, warm ups and starting rituals. Are they really necessary? I’ve met vocalists who go straight up on stage, no preparation whatsoever and just scream their hearts out. And by contrast, I know people who have painstakingly detailed ways of warming up that they never deviate from. The purpose of this post is to run you through a number of different warm ups that some people swear by so that you can try them out, as well as give a bit more thought as to what warm ups do to your throat and the purpose behind what I call ‘start up rituals’.

A quick definition I lifted from google tells us that a warm up can be understood as “exercising in preparation for strenuous activity” (wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn). This quick definition fits vocal performance as well as it does mundane exercise, given that the Vocal Chords are in fact muscles. Your throat creates all the different sounds that it can emit by vibrating the two ‘vocal folds’ contained within your larynx together (for the moment we’ll completely ignore use of the false chords), with different frequencies of vibration creating different pitches of sound. Hence, by warming up you allow the vocal folds to warm up and they’ll react a lot differently to if you hadn’t warmed them up.

While warming up isn’t always strictly necessary (oftentimes you’ll find yourself in a situation where you don’t have time for whatever reason, and it’s not the end of the world if you don’t), but it can make a massive amount of difference to your throat’s stamina, ability to create tones, the overall range of your voice and the amount of control you have over your throat. In general vocal performance becomes a million times easier having done a warm up. The only situation where I wouldn’t warm up would be if I were trying to replicate a vocalist’s tone who clearly didn’t warm up before hand, or had a fairly throaty and simple tone e.g. Abbath from Immortal, or numerous other prominent black metal vocalists.

But what warm ups can you do? I’ll describe 7 different types of specific warm up I’ve tried and experiment with over the years, giving an overview of the technique and my opinion on its effectiveness, and any interesting points about that respective warm up.

1)Traditional singing warm up – ‘do re mi fa so lah te do’

Pick a note, any old note (for the non-musical amongst you, just pick a low deep kind of a tone), then sing that note on ‘do’, slowly by increments of a tone (for non-musicians, any small increment will do) singing each word with each note as you go up. You can also do this in growls and screams, but I wouldn’t advise it without being warmed up first.

I use this technique all the time as a standard initial warm up, and as it can take you through your entire dynamic range, I don’t really see any particular weakness with this warm up, apart from maybe the weird looks you get in a venue growling along to a Julie Andrews song. I mean seriously.

2)Melissa Cross Approach

In her ‘Zen of Screaming’ DVD, Cross takes you through about 14 different warm up exercises and different students performing them all in their own respective vocal range in a clean tone. Her exercises invariably have you making strange noises (e.g Mee- gee monkeys, Wee-ee Wee-ee Wee-ee Wee’s and trying to replicate the sound of a French doorbell) up and down a scale, much like the ‘do re mi’ exercise detailed above.

Having tried the exercises, I don’t really find them useful at all. They barely even warmed up my throat from the cold street I had just come in off. While many famous and, in some cases, quite talented vocalists swear by her warm ups and take her word as gospel, I don’t. You can get the desired effects of this warm up by doing the ‘do re mi’ exercise, and look like a LOT less of an idiot than if you walking around saying “mee- gee, mee- gee” in different pitches for half an hour. By all means get the DVD and try them out yourself if interested, but these exercises proved entirely worthless (and on one occasion actually detrimental) to my vocal ability.

3)The Pitched Shout Exercise

This warm up is based around pitched shouting. You start off with a pitched shout at a normal speaking volume, and repeat it five times. Then increase your volume by a small increment and repeat five times. Repeat this process going from your normal speaking level of volume through to as loud as you can go while keeping the shout at a constant pitch. Repeat the entire process of going from normal levels to your loudest pitched shout three times. More if it’s a cold day, or you feel you really need to get particularly warmed up. 

This exercise is great for initially warming up your throat in a hurry, because it’s quick and efficient. It also requires sustained effort from your vocal chords and in general is a really easy one to remember and use. Personally I use the word “hey” just to try and not look/sound too weird when sitting backstage singing to myself, but it can work with anything. The only downside of this exercise is it only deals with volume, not with dynamic range, but as long as you do it along with other exercises in order to cover warming up your throat fully, it’s an amazingly useful little warm up.

4)Singing clean pitches of what you would when growling

An alternative to the ‘do re mi’ exercise is just singing through the songs you’re going to sing in a clean tone, making sure to include all the changes in dynamic range and timing in the song, rather than growling them.

While not wholly as effective, it can be useful in a limited sort of way. One positive of this warm up is it embeds the vocal structures of songs in your mind, and they’re easy to forget when you’re zipping about the stage from right to left, headbanging like a maniac and trying your best not to trip up over the bass drum mic or crash into your guitarist. Hell, I do this exercise for that very reason alone a lot of the time.

5)Extremes of the range of your throat

This isn’t really a structured exercise, but I do utilise it when warming up. Basically the two ends of your vocal range area really deep ‘ee’ drone sound at the bottom and a silly high falsetto at the other end. Basically, I just play around with saying different things or singing along with songs exclusively in these ranges. The resulting sounds are usually something resembling Mongolian Throat singing (look it up, it’s awesome!) or King Diamond/3 Inches Of Blood like vocals, which are hilariously off key when I sing them, but as long as I’m using that range it serves it’s purpose of warming my throat up.

6)Humming

Just humming for a sustained period of five minutes or so is an excellent vocal warm up, as humming is created by making the vocal folds vibrate together really quickly and this, unsurprisingly, warms them up a good deal. Don’t stick to humming one thing, hum sustained notes, hum melodies- do whatever. Variety is the spice of life after all, and also helps you get that little bit closer to your full dynamic range.

7)Growling along with things

Last but not least, simply growling along with things is a good finishing warm up. Whether blasting through ‘Pursuit of Vikings’ or singing one of my own songs, it lets me know whether the warm ups I’ve done so far have been effective or not, and whether I need to continue warming up or not. It’s usually best to do something slow to mid paced, like the afore mentioned Amon Amarth song, as you’re testing out whether the other warm ups have been effective or not. It can also be a good chance to recap on songs you’re not totally confident with before a show.

While the warm ups detailed above are the main ones I know that me, or people I know, use a lot, they’re by no means the only ones out there for you to find and try out! Hell, even talking with a mate for half an hour can be a good way of warming up. I find that if I rush out of the house to a practice straight out of bed, and without having spoken with anyone, my voice is about 3 times as hard to warm up because it hasn’t been used at all beforehand (also, for this reason doing vocals in the evening time is usually easier and more comfortable because you’ve been doing indirect warm ups all day long! If forced to perform in the morning/afternoon, take special care to make sure you’ve warmed up adequately).

Thus far I haven’t mentioned what I call ‘start up rituals’. A start up ritual is something you do before every show in order to get into a certain frame of mind, as well as warming yourself up for the impending performance. Anything can be incorporated into it, from specialised warm ups and physical exercises to touching your lucky rabbit’s foot or invoking Cthulhu to finally make his long awaited entrance onto this pitiful material plane. The purpose of it isn’t wholly to get warmed up or in a frame of mind, it’s kind of both, and fairly hard to convey the purpose of. I have my own start up rituals that some of you will know, and others won’t, but I’m not going to share them. Discover what works for you to get you pumped before a show, or puts you in that truly fabulous, or serial killer mind set.

And that, dear readers, is as close to a basic guide to warming up as I think I can write.

-E

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