I want to emphasize "most of you" because certainly there are a few of you who seem to be getting value of out of the forum. Good for you! I'm going to try to avoid opinion and just deal with the objective. There's only one post written within a week and it's my post about a coach's hilarious take on teaching what compression is. The next most recent post is also by me. Thyat was a serious question about "bleeding air grit" but not good enough to warrant an answer. Fair enough. This is free, so if my posts aren't good enough, they don't deserve help. I can either learn to write better or I can leave. Maybe I will leave since my last couple posts failed to pass muster for what is considered a worthwhile post here, but I'm not claiming my posts are anything special. At least I try though and I've never descended to a point where I enlisted artificial help to try to improve my writing. What you see is what you get. If that's not good enough, fine. I'll sleep like a baby tonight. I haven't seen anyone here whose posts made me think: "Now that came from a truly profound mind." Yet here we are on a forum for people who take air and turn it into art. No other endeavor leaves an individual so vulnerable, so utterly exposed....yet most of you can't summon the fortitude to write a post, lest it be passed over like my last two were. If you don't mind me offering you some constructive criticism: If the thought of posting here frightens you, develop thicker skin! Music is a business that will eat you alive if you don't have skin like alligator hide. Show business (which incudes singing) isn't looking for people who want it for their career; it's looking for people who must have it for their career because they cannot stand the thought of wasting their life doing anything else. There is a phenomenal difference between "want" and "must." The age-old conundrum in show business is: You can't get a part without an agent but you can't get an agent without a part. Why was that conundrum put there?

I finally understand why I've been stuck! Pushing too hard was the only repeatable way I could get distortion on notes. Fry scream has never been too hard. But real, on-demand, comfy distortion? Never. Cranking up my "gain knob" tended to just produce even cleaner, tighter tones (heavier mass) rather than the burbly grit I'm looking for. I took a break from learning distortion when I started making myself pass out in the middle of the best compressed grungy tones ~2nd passagio (G up to C#) even though my voice wasn't feeling any pain. Coming back into it in the past few months, trying to learn completely different coordination, I realize how seriously challenging it is for me to isolate adduction (heavier mass) from compression (more respiration pressure + constriction up top). This is why only "pushing" works: a huge force of wind overcoming heavy mass distorts - but too forcefully. If I could lighten up my mass while maintaining compression, then distortion would be a breeze! What's helped me learn differently this time: 1. Trying to always keep a little wind in the note - I visualize adding some of the 'h' sound (as in 'hot') to things, which took me a long time to grasp but is working out nicely. Doing it without a note sounds a bit like a constant wheeze. This seems to be part of the distortion "gain knob". 2. Using cry tilt more - Thanks to copying Draven's default singing mode, I'm currently obsessed with isolating cry exactly. Over-crying in silence with no other efforts (while doing chores, etc.) to exercise that strength and coordination, regardless of what my face decides to do. 3. More TA/CT strength-building - distorting positions are usually unstable, and more strength makes stability naturally easier. At constant pitches across my range, I do the "superhero": mmm-ee-yeh-yah-yoh-oo (my souped-up version of Maestro Kyle's "hero") with lots of quack at the y's. Doing these slowly in the tenor range feels 100% like lifting weights and *works* like gangbusters!

I don't have music to share for Music Monday like I had hoped, but I want to still share something valuable. While I no longer coach music career as my main thing, I still enjoy constantly learning about and keeping up with current music business best practices. While researching the validity of a certain music business book, I accidentally came across the Custom GPT, The Musician's Roadmap. I used this tool to map out a full release plan for my songs, collaborations, and poetry, that fits my brand, genre, goals, ideal fan, and more. But to do that, I had to know how to talk to it about yourself. Otherwise, it give incredibly generic answers. If you're unfamiliar with Custom GPTs, to put it simply, they're an AI conversational interface that's trained on knowledge base files and specific instructions to answer your questions. Trained and instructed correctly, they can be very powerful tools. In this case, The Musician's Roadmap is trained on just about anything you need to grow your music career, from recording to growing a fanbase. Like any Custom GPT, the more detailed information you give it about you and what you're trying to do, the better the answer it will give you. One big trick with AI is to get it to ask you questions to help you come up with better prompts or to ask it better questions, especially if you haven't yet fully figured out how to prompt it or what information to give it. To test it, I gave it general information, just to see what type of answer it gives and if it was worth using. The answer was detailed, but as I told it: "This list is vague and overwhelming. Ask me questions to help me form a better plan based upon my brand, music, ideal fans, and more." That opened up the floodgates. The questions it gave me, which I'll put below, helped it give me a very details plan specifically for me. That started a good back and forth conversation that felt like an extremely well-informed expert was brainstorming ideas with me. Any new ideas I had, I would ask it questions about, which it would then compare to it's knowledge on trends, market, and genres. That led to a whole conversation about possible things to do for social media, fan interaction, release schedule, collaborators, hired guests, other creative offerings, and much more. I now have a full, multi-phase, monthly plan to start moving forward with, and good ideas for how to adapt it as I go.

Yesterday i was hoarse, i did mistakes, then i warmed up again, lightly, did much more screaming and i was expecting to regret it later or today, but nothing, no tension no hoarsness!!

Wow! It s absolutely amaizing the difference when warming up, get much more control over false folds and they vibrate difference, more steadily and faster And vocal folds as well, easier to fry,