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.

I tried what you had mentioned before, @Draven Grey, in just recording every other line during a vocal take. The difference is night and day. It's so much easier to get good takes! Thanks for the tip.

Over the past month or more I've been working on a study of sorts trying to get down the vocals for Crawl Away by Tool. It seemed like a good piece because there are long, drawn-out notes with heavier grit. I think I've gotten it to a place I'm satisfied with, although I probably am actually using more distortion than he does in the song. But I figured, hey, it is the skill I'm trying to learn so I may as well step it up a notch. This recording is after countless takes to get the very best ones, granted I was learning the more aggressive stuff more or less from scratch over that time. This is the vocals only, so I uploaded it to SoundCloud so you can see the waveform and skip over the silent parts. It was recorded through a compressor but otherwise it's completely dry. https://soundcloud.com/to_the_sun/crawl-away-a-cappella

This net label recently put out a compilation with this song of mine on it. I thought I'd share it here even though it doesn't have any particularly aggressive vocals in it. I'll be releasing this song later on my own album, more officially. https://dittanyofcrete.bandcamp.com/track/there-stalks-a-daeva-this-azimuth

I've been meaning to post about my progress, but every day there's more of it, so anything I would post would be automatically outdated. I did have a bit of a revelation I wanted to share though. I've been watching that vocal distortion part two video every day and I thought I basically understood the purpose of making that dopey sound you demonstrate while saying "powah become death." But I realized today I wasn't doing enough of it. You actually can pull it back and down into that shape even further, and it feels like it almost opens up your throat a little. Of course you have to keep the resonant anchor vibrating in the middle of your head/top of your mouth. Otherwise, I imagine you would just loosen up your throat which, I know from experience, will tear you up right away. But if you start high and then pull it back and down into that shape while keeping the resonant anchor vibrating, the throat gets wider but stays flexed, and you get way deeper, way more powerful distortion out of it. Definitely hard to explain in words. And of course, I've just begun to understand it, but I feel like I had to share because I'm excited to see where this goes.