I hope you're all doing well and making some good music lately. I wanted share a quick experiment I'm running over the next week. I've been thinking a lot about how tough it can be to practice singing solo. When you're working through modules or practicing on your own, it's incredibly easy to get stuck in your own head and wonder if you're actually hitting the placement right or accidentally strain your throat. Because I have a unique pocket of availability right now, I'm opening up something informal called a 7-Day On-Demand Support Sprint. Instead of a normal 1:1 live lesson where we have to sync up calendars and try to make everything perfect in a formal 60-minute block, we just use Zoom chat (video, audio, and text) for a full week. Basically, whenever you happen to be practicing, writing, or rehearsing over the next 7 days, you just record a quick phone audio or video clip of whatever you're working on—a song line, a range transition, or a scream placement you're fighting with. I'll check it out and send you back a video or voice note breaking down the micro-adjustments so you can get on top of it ASAP. It's an ongoing, back-and-forth conversation on your own schedule. I'm keeping it super low-key and doing it for a flat $125 for a week. I can only do this for 5 people right now, so I can actually keep up with the threads and give everyone my focused attention around my other work. If you want to jump in and have me in your pocket while you practice for a week, just drop a comment below or send me a message with "BACKSTAGE" to be sure I don't miss it.

I finally understand why I've been stuck! Pushing too hard was the only repeatable way I could get distortion on notes. Fry scream has never been too hard. But real, on-demand, comfy distortion? Never. Cranking up my "gain knob" tended to just produce even cleaner, tighter tones (heavier mass) rather than the burbly grit I'm looking for. I took a break from learning distortion when I started making myself pass out in the middle of the best compressed grungy tones ~2nd passagio (G up to C#) even though my voice wasn't feeling any pain. Coming back into it in the past few months, trying to learn completely different coordination, I realize how seriously challenging it is for me to isolate adduction (heavier mass) from compression (more respiration pressure + constriction up top). This is why only "pushing" works: a huge force of wind overcoming heavy mass distorts - but too forcefully. If I could lighten up my mass while maintaining compression, then distortion would be a breeze! What's helped me learn differently this time: 1. Trying to always keep a little wind in the note - I visualize adding some of the 'h' sound (as in 'hot') to things, which took me a long time to grasp but is working out nicely. Doing it without a note sounds a bit like a constant wheeze. This seems to be part of the distortion "gain knob". 2. Using cry tilt more - Thanks to copying Draven's default singing mode, I'm currently obsessed with isolating cry exactly. Over-crying in silence with no other efforts (while doing chores, etc.) to exercise that strength and coordination, regardless of what my face decides to do. 3. More TA/CT strength-building - distorting positions are usually unstable, and more strength makes stability naturally easier. At constant pitches across my range, I do the "superhero": mmm-ee-yeh-yah-yoh-oo (my souped-up version of Maestro Kyle's "hero") with lots of quack at the y's. Doing these slowly in the tenor range feels 100% like lifting weights and *works* like gangbusters!

What’s something you’ve been working on that you’re excited about or proud of? Share a clip with us! Raw and unedited, straight from your phone works great—even if you don't see this until after the weekend. I'm really excited about what recording the attached clips means for me. More on that in a bit. I got a little too into it and loud by the end of the clip, which made the distortion harsher than I intended, but still totally comfortable. The song is the second verse of the song "The Weight" that I wrote a while back. It's taken over a year of work to change my voice from The Silent Still’s style into the newer “Hard Rock with a Southern Gothic soul” style. I only recently finally fully relaxed into the new voice. I feels a bit nostalgic too, like I’m going back to a lot of the gospel roots I started in 35 years ago, but with FAR more skill than back then. 150+ songs in, I’m excited about bringing the top songs of this bunch to fruition later this year. ***** As the main vocal coach here, I want to note something for any of you still struggling to really nail a new vocal technique or sound. The average timeline to go from learning a completely new technique, sound, or vocal shape, to being able to naturally relax into it seems to be: 1. Two to six weeks to build a general understanding and feel for it. 2. Two to three months from start to be able to do it on purpose, but still having to think about it. 3. Eighteen months from start to do it without thinking much about it. Some people are more intuitive about certain aspect of the voice and speed up that process greatly. Some haven't built the foundations they need in order to have something solid to build on top of, and end up taking years to get where they want to be. Sometimes it can seem like each new thing requires going back to the foundations and rebuilding one piece at a time into the new thing. But on average, each new thing you add follows the above timeline. That's not to say you can't train multiple things at once.

Very cool vocal performance by Sia in this song: https://youtu.be/t2NgsJrrAyM?si=jgioXLPW0FiGAl0C&t=242 Wondering if anyone has ideas about how she achieves those interesting vocal "chirps" when she sings "I'm alive..." around 4:00 into the song.

I like to sing melodically with grit, so I've never actively tried to learn false fold screams. Then I came across a guy who said that the more you work on your false fold screams, the false folds adapt in a way so that they can vibrate faster than the false folds of the typical non-vocalist!!! That's amazing. No wonder these guys who have been doing them for years and years get so much more distortion. It's not as if the flase fold scream is some ultra-technical technique. It's about as basic as they come and maybe that's why screaming is more in vogue than singing with grit: It's harder to sing with grit and manage both the clean note and the grit you place over the top than to just create distortion. I thought: If I learn to do false fold screams, my false folds could adapt in a way that they vibrate faster, which could give me better quality, more badass grit when I sing with grit. So, maybe there is some benefit in learning to scream even though I'm not a screamer. I have looked at numerous tutorials for false fold screams including Gabriel Bonhila's channel (he does a tremendous Alex Terrible type scream) and David Benites Extreme Vocal. Not one of them uses a hyoid pull. They don't even use a similar sounding term. It's amazing how much distortion they can generate without using any constriction. They create far more distortion than I 'd ever even need to! Not only do they not ever mention a hypoid pull, they don't even say to use constriction! I thought: "How can they be creating so much distortion without one of the three essential in gredients? My curiosity was piqued. I'm wondering if maybe hyoid pulls are only necessary for singing with grit but not for screaming. One said specifically: "Do not squeeze or narrow your vocal tract." I tried letting the tract remain open and I got a much better false fold scream than I did when I was trying to make my vocal tract narrower to get that "thumb over the water hose" on my airflow! I couldn't belive I'd never thought to try that.