Hordes of Metallica fans claim that the band's 1989 performance in Seattle was the peak of James Hetfield's vocal ability. Really? It's energetic! I'll give it that, but is "energetic" the sole measure of great rock vocals? I'm going to posit that what a lot of people love about this special type of singing is really the byproduct of Hetfield's failure to understand and apply the basic principles of good breath control. Did you ever wonder why he has no vibrato? Developing a natural vibrato requires a certain consistency of airflow. Do you notice how many of his notes get abruptly chopped off instead of being able to resonate and ring out? How about the habit of ending phrases with a sudden expulsion of air into an "ahh"? Breath control is the common denominator with all these things. Also consider his posture. What do you think that does to his airflow? Do you see how low he has the mic set up? He has to bend his neck down at such an unnatural angle to sing into the microphone. It creates a kink in the pathway of his airflow. You don't want that! He did learn. If you look at Metallica's live performance from Slane Castle in Ireland on June 8th, 2019, you'll see that his posture was far better. Hetfield had stopped slumping forward and tilting his neck down like he did thirty years earlier. It looks better and it works better. Win/win situation. Things like that help explain why he was able to have the long career he's had. He quit drinking too. He developed discipline and used it to improve his vocal hygiene and technique. If only he'd applied the same discipline to his vocal technique that he applied to the mechanics of his guitar playing, and done it from the outset of his singing career, I believe he would have become an exponentially better vocalist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yHJBDeshPA

Because of how important Cry is for singing, how often it comes up, and how pretty much all our vocal training is about building better command and control over CRY, I made a quick video about it with some of the new ways I've been teaching it this year. As a vocal mode, the combination of physical and acoustic positioning, Cry has tow main parts: 1. Lift, float, or top-down whimper into the desired sound color from front to back of the mouth (the acoustic mode spectrum: edging, neutral, curbing). The edgier or more forward the position, the higher the larynx wants to move, also narrowing the vocal passage and AES into twang, making the voice ring brighter and project more easily. The thing to watch out for is constricting vertically, which can choke off of the vocal passage. 2. Sob physical quality (as Estill termed it) slightly dampens/relaxes the larynx (not necessarily neutral, but not moving too much), opens the throat, widen the pharynx (feeling like opening or expanding the vocal tract, relaxing vocal production overall, and adding darker harmonics. The thing to watch out for is opening too much and it sounding too operatic, emo, or dopey. Lift and sob together create an open and more effortless feeling in the vocal tract while singing that we call Cry vocal mode. Cry balances the two, helping you get the best of both. This means more effortless vocal fold adduction because medial compression is more passive—like how a stretched rubber band can hold something in the middle, but it's not from directly applying pressure to the middle.

A "screaming coach" who ostensibly has an entire academy of aspiring screamers has explained compression! I could not have made this up myself. Here are his exact words: "Put your hands lightly around your own throat and act like you're being strangled. Don't actually squeeze hard from the outside, just let your body react to the idea of it. Notice how your throat naturally clamps DOWN and closes up on the inside. That's compression! That's the exact sensation you need for a solid fry scream." Wow! I can only imagine how great all my favorite songs would sound if the vocalists had only sung as if they were being strangled at the time!

It's quite unfortunate that even though AI could be restricted to doing things that people either hate to do or that would be dangerous for us to do, often we see AI being used for doing things people love to do, such as the arts! If you can't create art without the help of AI, then perhaps you don't have anything worthwhile to say. If you could create art without AI, but you use it anyway, maybe you don't enjoy the creative process. Perhaps you lacked the discipline or the drive to do the work to develop the necessary skill to be able to go through the process and end up with something you can be proud of. What if you decided that you didn't want anything to do with having artificial help to create art and you relegated AI to the role of something you could use as an information source while developing the requisite skill for creating something you'd truly be happy with? Would that be an ethical use of AI? I hope so! I wouldn't trust AI as my sole source of information on how to develop the skills I need to sing well and it sure can't give me feedback on how well I'm doing, but how about using AI as an adjunct to buying lessons and courses? Would that be reasonable? I think there's an element of the subjective here, but since it would only be used as a supplement, rather than as a replacement for teachers, I think it would be an ethical use of AI. How much help would AI be as a supplement to taking lessons and/or buying courses though? Only one way to find out! I decided to see how much AI knew about what creates vocal distortion. I wanted to see what level of quality it had to offer in the answers it gave me. I was curious to see if it would offer anything more than very surface level information. I asked AI two questions. I'm show you both of my questions and the responses I got. I'll let you be the judge of how well it did in answering my questions. FIRST QUESTION: I asked: "What creates the air restriction in singing with distortion"? AI: "In singing, that feeling of an air "restriction"—often called vocal compression—is the foundational mechanic required to safely create grit, rasp, or heavy distortion.

Who are you seeing in concert? What project are you currently working on? What do you want to see happen here? HELP ME LIVE VICARIOUSLY THROUGH YOU! HAHA! I'm just kidding...mostly. While August brings a lot of transitions for me, the main transition I'm excited about is moving from months of court stuff to finally having more time for music and community. I've had so many things I want to do here, but increasingly less time to do them until now. While I it won't all be ready in August, I will be starting the setup of my new course versions, memberships, and a new vocal program, using this community as the hub. With that also comes ramping up content like I've been wanting to do for months. But there's something particular about my ADHD brain that I want to keep in mind. Often, if I tell you all the details, my brain marks it as done already. So, I'm really only going to say that I'm excited about what's coming, and would love to hear more about... What would YOU like to see here? I'm also producing an alt. rock artist while planning out my own music for this Fall. Being in the hard rock genre with a southern gothic soul, I've been thinking about collaborations as I build. I have a connection with Lzzy Hale, but I'm nowhere near where I need to be yet to bring her on. Taylor Momsen and Dorothy Martin also are on my list for the future. But I'm looking smaller, like Jared Benjamin, Lø Spirit, or others on the rise in social media. Is there anyone you would recommend?