@Kenny Kendall Great songs. I wish it wasn't AI. A voice like that would be great.

In the video, I actually hear it differently than what you're describing. Halford sounds very thin in his folds to me in that range.But that could just be because I have a hard time hearing through the technique in this video. HOWEVER, Halford does have a larger vocal tract and Tessitura, so his voice does naturally have lower harmonics in it. He's often classified as a lower tenor, where Bach is a lyric tenor. I don't like classifications when it comes to range (even the two of them have the same range), but I do think it's a quick way to describe the natural sound color because of the size of the vocal tract.

@Kenny Kendall Sob, larynx dampening (not dumping or pulling it down), more /uh/ shading rather than just the /ah/ shading that good cry gives you. If you curb your vowels more, the larynx will dampen a bit, and vice versa. This add weight to the sound color. But too much can open the vowels up too much and sound like yelling. e.g. I think Bruce Dickinson's Tears Of The Dragon was a bit too open compared to what we're used to from him, giving him a shouty/yell sound in the choruses. Taking that idea too far can be heard in the choruses of Robert Lunte's cover of that song.

The #1 thing BY FAR that screamers and distorted singers do that leads to injury? PUSHING AND/OR FORCING VOCAL DISTORTION LEADS TO INJURY In other words, they're going too heavy in throttle and not learning the shapes for the sounds they want to make, and how to properly use breath support for distortion—squeezing the ribs like a toothpaste tube, rather than upping airflow like we do in speech. I often tell people that it's called "support" for a reason, not "force." Even in clean singing, a big problem I see people run into is pushing and forcing a shape/sound rather than using shaping and proper support of that shape. The other issues come from forcing something to happen in other ways. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if the sounds the singers you mentioned were doing before injury could be recreated in a much more relaxed and safe way; or even conditioned to be a louder over time. That always reminds me of Alex Terrible's live chat during COVID, where someone asked him how to scream as low and extremely loud as he does. He laughed and said that it took him 12 years to get there. THE PSYCHOSOMATIC ISSUE From working with thousands in my courses and hundreds one-on-one, I've seen a psychosomatic issue arise that goes two ways: I. EXPECTED PAIN A previous illness or injury keeps them from being able to even approach something that feels similar to what caused the injury or what used to hurt to do. E.g. I had one student that had previously survived lymphatic cancer. He had a very real mental block keeping him from singing A4+ because it had hurt so much to do when he had cancer. Since it was in person, he could see what I was playing on my keyboard. So while chatting with him to distract him, I transposed my keyboard to look like I was playing G4 when the pitch actually being played was A#4. When I went back into the exercise he was effortlessly singing A#4 and B4 for quite a while. When I finally told him what pitches he was actually singing without effort, his mental block completely went away.

@Kenny Kendall I was specifically talking about screaming, rather than grit—using tension in the soft palate (more lifted) as his perceived stability and emotionality rather than than hyoid pull (in this case, tension from holding the larynx down) that was giving him unwanted lower harmonics in his acoustics. "Hyoid pull" can be felt when: 1. Muscles hold the larynx down 2. Arytenoid contract, thickening the vocal folds 3. Constriction or narrowing happens in the lower vocal tract, often from lengthening the space between the true and false folds (see #1) In the scream, I needed my student to relax his larynx and lift the voice more in order to get the fry scream on the pitches he was trying to get. He needed to feel that tension somewhere in order to give an emotional performance, so we tried his soft palate in order to place him better for the scream he wanted. He ended up feeling the pull into the soft palate as more straight up, causing tension where the soft and hard palates meet. In the end, cry vocal mode IS singing, which is both a lifted resonance (top-down whimper) and relaxing the larynx (sob). Distortion above the bridge often requires over-crying; hence the "pull" into the soft palate.That can feel like a yawn, relaxing the back of the tongue, opening up the back of the mouth, slightly lowering the larynx, more /aw/, or a number of other things. And the constriction needed can feel like narrowing, hyoid pull, tilting the larynx back, holding back air, a loud whisper, smoker's voice, an air "old man" grunt, etc, etc... Following the theme of this entire conversation, it's about subtlety or "touching" the constriction, not about just going for it.

As you go higher in pitch with distortion, the acoustic have to change. Lower down may feel small and forward in the mouth, but the higher you go, it needs to open up towards the back. It's the spectrum I showed before or compressed to uncompressed, front to back (red feeling more closed and blue feeling more open). But another way to think of it is a tear-drop shape on its side inside your head. Lower down, things tend to come to a point near the front of the mouth (or under the chin for some), and then open up to the large round space in the back up high. You'll max out at A#4 or B4 if too loud, because of the extra compression and lifted/expanded resonance that comes from that force. And if you lighten up as you go higher, relying instead on bracing the core for support of distortion, it will feel more like mixed voice, open in the back but lower and smaller than when you were loud. I recently described more about that support and other aspects of distortion here: https://www.skool.com/rocksingingsuccess/training-for-cry?p=4110db5d In the end, if you can't bridge the voice during the engine revs, focus instead on individual notes and melodies. Or perhaps work on pulling less compressed distortion you can already get up higher into lower and lower pitches, paying attention to how you might have to shift it to be both lighter and forward more in order to stay stable as you come down.

@Kenny Kendall That's right around where it starts becoming more uncompressed and /ah/-ish from opening more in the vocal tract, changing from harsh to smoother, or hard palate to back of the mouth. If you want to keep a harsher sound, then the forward placement (lower pitches) moving to further back opening placement as you go up in pitch has to go to the crown rather than straight back—to the cockney "oi" in the crown, rather than the smoother distortion from /aw/ or /uh/ on top of the throat.

@Valtteri Lipsanen I wrote a full breakdown of it for screams HERE. For more compressed forms of distortion, which are mostly full-voiced and therefore categorized as grit, this thread describes it more, including a visual. Distortion over a head voice, more falsetto feel, produces a more scream like sound, and this categorized as screams. Those links should help clarify. Full-voice distortion is confined in acoustics to the soft palate. Heady distortion acoustic placement can circle the entire head for different sounds. I describe this more in the first link. To answer you directly, in short: Distortion is on a spectrum, compressed and closed off where you have to force air through the closed flesh, to uncompressed and bleeding air from the glottis from being too thin to hold back air. Constriction is what narrows the vocal tract, effectively covering the true cords and causing more distortion/harmonic-saturation in the false cords because of it. I often call that feeling a "hyoid pull" because you feel things slightly flex and close off in the hyoid (where the neck and chin meet). The "Smoker's Voice" that you add to the clean voice to make it distorted is a combination of compression and constriction control. Witch's cackle is only part of that. To make witch's cackle airy and more of a fry or smoker's voice, you have to add some constriction front of it. HERE is an hour-long discussion about this with me and my certified Rock Vocal Technique teachers that you might find helpful too. We each describe it slightly differently, giving you a few more visuals and approaches to try.

@Valtteri Lipsanen Awesome slip into grit! The G#4 you're doing in falsetto/fry-scream is often a VERY difficult pitch to get a fry-scream with, because of how loose the musculature gets when that light. I often have to start on A4 at the lowest, and many of my students start on C5 or C#5 to help balance compression control better. I say all that just to say that I"m impressed. Haha! I'm going to do what I do and use this as an excuse to avoid the mountain of work I have at the moment so I can help with answers that are likely more in-depth than you need. HAHA! I just hope it's not too long... AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD You can also try the "old man grunt" instead of "smoker's voice" when closer to your first bridge, E4 (maybe C4 to G4). That type of airy grunt is what you feel when you start with purse air and then try to hold it back, literally constricting the airflow. I usually only teach it to get a feel for constriction, since people tend to overdo it when trying to use it to get grit. It's difficult to only touch on it rather than turn it on full. RELAXING I often focus on Cry in general to keep people relaxed and in a better shape for singing. But often, "top down whimper," "sobbing," "moving towards a yawn," and similar descriptions are still easy to misunderstand and/or overdo. Simply put, the lift of the voice into the addition of head-voice resonance is what separates singing from speech. The way that often feels in clean singing is a lift up, or string pulling the voice, towards or behind the eyes (the true mask being the brow), or straight up to the top of the head like we do when we yawn. And while lifting, we also keep the larynx relaxed so that it doesn't constrict vertically and choke us off (especially on higher pitches). This was of feminizing the voice form lifting into head voice ("Michael Jackson voice") and then relaxing the larynx like we do when we sigh, places us into cry vocal mode. Distortion or Grit, however, adds onto this. It relies on over-crying, or rather more lift into the desired acoustic position (sound color), the feeling of opening up the vocal tract (enlarging resonant space), and a dampening of the larynx into a more /uh/, /ah/ or /aw/ overtones. This thins the glottis, and makes it easier to bleed air through it. The trick in keep that as relaxed as possible in the throat is two-fold: