A SUBMITTED QUESTION ***** I've been doing what you told me and realized something when switching between resonances. Whenever I go high/into head voice and I want to go back down to chest voice my larynx gets stuck, it's a really odd feeling. I was trying to go back down from head voice while using the straw when I felt everything jam up into place with air nowhere to go - it created a really pressurized chamber inside of my mouth combined with the puffy cheeks. I have been trying to cry but I suspect I've been doing it wrong. I feel tension in my throat when I'm crying so I guess that's not correct. Also, I'm still not able to utilize forward placement. The most I've been able to feel is vibrations in my nose. The straw warmup did clear my chest voice out but it's not helping me even while doing the sirens because of the larynx thing. ***** Great question! This is something a LOT of people struggle with at first, both with the straw AND the missed fundamentals of the singing voice that can smooth out the transition of chest and head voice as well as ghelp you with more effortless singing in geneal. STRAW VS NORMAL SINGING For the straw sirens, don't worry too much about your voice flipping. It's mostly about a stretch from as low as you can sing to as high as you can sing while staying SUPER LIGHT (light and sqeuaky on the top end). As you learn more about and implement better cry vocal mode, it will smooth out, but that's not the main point of the sirens. Most vocal flips, or getting stuck trying to "switch resonances," happen because the chest voice wasn't places well to begin with—where even chest voice is mixed, which I'll describe more below. Singing into the straw is where you want more emphasis on cry and twang. It actually takes a bit more effort than normal singing, meaning you have to give it both more twang and cry than normally required. Cry is the foundation. When normal singing, it's all about lift and sob; or rather top-down whimper ("Michael Jackson" voice or feminization of the voice) putting resonance up and out, behind the nose and eyes, and ALSO sob relaxing the larynx. Both of these together relax the larynx and give you a mix of head-voice and chest-voice resonance throughout your range—more chesty down low and more heady up high, like a giant cross-fade. Twang, edging acoustics, or pointing the voice behind the nose or eyes adjusts your sound color. Front to back is edging to curbing (bright to round). Up and down in that spot is the top-down whimper of cry.

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.

This two and a half minute video video shows how to use stop plosive consonants to build cord compression for vocal strength: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAiQPCuN_Lw It looks like a good exercise, but I'm not sure, because I had heard that using glottal attacks, hard glottal onsets, vocal pops, etc, makes the cords slam against each other and is destructive because of that. So, my question is, is using these stop plosives an effective way of building better cord compression like in the type of exercise that the video shows, or does it create a "vocal pop" or "glottal attack" that makes the vocal cords slam together and hurt them?

Suppose a band has just been signed to a record contract and they are going to a nice recording studio to record their album. They're trying to get the album recorded reasonably quickly. if they're in the studio for 8 or 12 hours, or however long is typical, how much of that time would the lead vocalist actually be singing on a day when they're recording lead vocals? Taking into account things like double or triple tracking and doing harmony parts, how many hours might a lead vocalist be expected to sing in one day? Would that vocalist be expected to sing as long the next day and the day after that for a lot of days or would they likely record guitars or bass the next day to give the singer a break if he had to sing a lot of hours? What would be considered "a lot of hours" for a lead vocalist of a hard rock or metal band in the studio?