Happy 4th, 250th, Independence Day, Treason Day, weekend, and family day. Whichever way you spin it, I hope it's a good one. I just finished checking my mixes before heading out grab Ender and go spend time with close friends, my second family (Yeah...I don't really wear my hat around the house unless I'm about to leave; I'm not a savage!). I have more mixing late tonight and early tomorrow, before a good day of vocal lessons. I miss being on here as much as I want to be. I have thoughts! I have plans! This is my last month of craziness before I have full control over my business again and the almost year-long fight to simply survive is over. Not all of you know what I'm referring to, but quite a few of you do. I often see this US holiday as a turning point for the year. This year, at least this July, it's a VERY big turning point for me. Everything after July will be about rebuilding and growing rather than surviving. I"m grateful you're all a part of that. When you get some down time, perhaps after the fireworks, I would love to hear about whaat you've been up to this weekend. Anything restful, new, refreshed, or driving you forward? Until then, have a great weekend!

One of the best ways to train and warm up distortion is to rev your voice like a motorcycle. Here's how.

Here's an interesting article on how AI music works and some efforts to reduce the unremunerated exploitation of creators. Thoughts? https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/how-ai-music-works

In 1976, Judas Priest recorded Sad Wings Of Destiny with Rob Halford on lead vocals and at 7:19 into the song Victim Of Changes, Halford begins what may be the first false fold scream on record. Halford absolutely does a false fold scream from about 7:19 to seven twenty two and a half seconds and you might argue that from about seven twenty two and a half seconds on, that maybe it no longer is a false fold scream and you'd be right. It's something much harder to do. At somewhere between 7:22 and 7:23, Halford's false fold scream transitions into something where the sound from the true vocal folds can be much more clearly heard despite a massive amount of distortion over his voice. Essentially from seven twenty two and a half seconds on, the false fold scream becomes a "distortion siren" that peaks at A5! It's a remarkable achievement for any vocalist, but by 1976 standards, this was the metal equivalent of what putting a man on the moon was in 1969. Here's the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swiKkmcHxHY

For a long time the main thing on my mind when going into a practice session would be how to get better at creating grit or distortion. I was a distortion freak! I find it as fascinating as ever to be able to sing with grit and I've even gotten a little bit interested in screaming, but mostly it was about singing melodically with grit or even pitched screaming, which essentially is the most extreme end of the spectrum that goes from singing with light rasp all the way to using pitched screams. Recently I hit a plateau. It didn't seem like any more progress was possible unless I made some type of fundamental change. It occurred to me that the quality of your gritty singing is going to be dependent on the quality of the signal from the source - the true folds. I'm no expert in acoustics but it makes sense to me that if we're using the false folds and other supraglottal structures to saturate the clean signal with distortion, then the more robust the clean signal is, the better you're going to be able to saturate it with distortion. In essence, good quality clean vocals lead to good quality gritty vocals and low quality clean vocals lead to low quality gritty vocals.