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yuutokun

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  1. Hello everyone. I'm currently a vocalist for a small hardcorish band in Japan. When I first joined, I couldn't sing for crap (Here's a demo to show how I used to sing http://www.audioleaf.com/w-t-e/. An analysis of my problems in the past may still be helpful now) However, after time I came slightly more decent as I experimented with different techniques and whatnot I found online. But until recently I still just felt like I was not about to get the power,tone, or emotion I wanted. It felt like something was holding my voice back. A few months ago, I watched a video on youtube that really started to make things quick and made me realize I had been approaching things the wrong way In the past I did my best to aim for "the mask" as it were but when I did that I always felt like something was holding my voice back. It wasn't until I started to aim the sound at the area under my larynx and down to the V in my neck that I was able to sing with less effort/ more power and in a fuller voice. It also nearly doubled my range and weirdest of all, when I put my hand near my sinuses, I feel them resonating. Can do a live gig with singing high and screaming for 3o minutes without my voice wearing out too. There is absolutely no feeling of aiming for the mask though. Indeed, I "aim" for the space under my larynx as I previously mentioned. Given the explanation and the sensations I've given, can anyone tell physically what it is I may be doing? I know it must be some kind of compression or something. I can even push it to be more metallic almost Guns and Rosesish at times, though I tend to avoid that sound. I'll get some live samples up soon enough to demonstrate.
  2. Greetings everyone! I hope all is well. I made a post awhile back talking about a similar topic but I think it was too abstract to catch on so I'm going to go at it from another angle this time. My biggest hurdle with my singing has been my pitch. I have tended to sing just under the note and on higher notes I would strain or swap into head voice without a second thought. I have practiced diaphragm support and worked alot with tongue, throat, and facial positioning to better my tone and attempt to hit the right pitch but nothing seemed to do it. I was breathing properly from my diaphragm as far as I could tell and as I make instrumental stuff myself I know my hearing isn't that bad as to throw me off in the same sour spot again and again. Most of all, I could hear and tell that I am going off the center of the note but it was like there was nothing I can do. I felt really helpless. How have I learned to overcome this? Here's where it gets a little strange. I tune my ear/brain to the key of the song. Until I am familiar with the song I let out a legato note and adjust it until it harmonizes with key. (Once I am familiar I can prefocus automatically but doing it with my voice is good for practice) From that point on, I feel like I am singing within a frame or box and as long as I sing in this box I can nail the notes without falling flat or out of key. I am almost certainly a baritone but I am able to sing songs like Linkin Park's Numb in a lightly heady but full voice without straining to hit the high notes. This technique has made it much easier to sing a number of songs and gives my singing a much more stable feel to it. Does anyone have any idea what Im talking about? Do you just tune to the song without thinking? One problem I still need to work out is how to make sure I am using the right technique for the higher parts of my range. I have been working on using the appropriate vowel sounds and Im progressing fairly well, but one thing I have no idea how to go about is the whole larynx dampening thing Ive seen mentioned on here time and time again. Is this essential for high notes? More importantly how is this performed? Are there any good visual techniques or exercises to feel and practice this? Any help or input would be very much appreciated.:)
  3. Another update, last night I was (for a little while until I lost the configuration) getting some really nice natural vibrato on the legato notes. It the first time to experience it, so it felt a bit wierd. Almost like a automatic machine gun in the back of my mouth going off. I tensed up a bit after that likely due to just being physically exhausted. I think the hardest part of all this is making the correct vocal configurations perminent and unconcious. Which, esential is the point of all those vocal excercises I guess. For the time being, I still have to do all the warm-ups and checks to get things going. I'm going to record something tonight if I have time. Unfortunately I don't play any physical instruments (though I am quite good with programming music i.e. MIDI). I'll record a backtrack and try layering my voice over it.:)
  4. Thanks for all the replies so far and thanks Robert for taking the time to comment (I've been following your videos on YouTube). Last night I went to karaoke (the only place I can practice without ticking off my neighbors) and worked with singing with proper breath support, an open throat, twang, while raising the route of my tongue. The results were amazing. I will definitely record this and upload but my voice before and after the changes. I was able to stay consistently on pitch and even though my voice is quite low I was able to sing tenor range songs in standard key which is the first time really since I've started singing. I think my tongue has been the greatest obstacle to my progress (well, besides myself at times). I think my tongue is really wide and meaty or something as it looks really different to a lot of the singers I see on you tube. A lot of people have narrower looking tongue. Raising the back while projecting forward basically helped eliminate my break and most of all stabilized my pitch (which being in a rock band has frustrated me to no end). It also seemed that even if I changed the timbre by adding nasality or darkness to my voice my pitch accuracy stayed consistent. Nasality as someone mentioned is not necessarily a good thing, but the genre I'm doing likely calls for more nasality than most of the regulars on this board are into. Robert's siren videos really helped alot for getting me to raise my pitch and coordinate my voice a bit. Another thing that helped tremendously were a series of tips from Lisa Popeil on YouTube. Most YouTube vocal teachers are strictly SLS and I am somewhat weary of their methods but she seemed to share a lot of ideas consistent with Rob and CVI. Little by little I'm starting to find my way. Next I'm going to need to upload some stuff and get advice from you guys. Thanks again any other advice or opinions you have are very much appreciated.
  5. I wanted to get some feedback regarding tounge position. The back of the tounge should be up, correct? I've seen many times people saying that the tounge position for ng is the correct position for singing and that the throat should be opened simultaniously for better sound production. Lastly (and what I find the most confusing) is the placement of the note when singing. Are you supposed to feel it in the gap between your palate and raised tounge? If anything I've said is wrong or inaccurate, I would very much appreciate it. My tounge likes to give me lots of problems.
  6. Hey guys! I appreciate all the support so far. This forum has really been helping me out alot lately. Especially that video that was posted about resonance with the gahs and the yahs. That was like a key that unlocked my higher range. I went to the local karaoke place (Im in Japan so the rooms are private) and let loose. My voice opened alot and I experimented while monitoring my pitch on the pitch detector on the machine. One thing that I noticed and that I've had a consistent problem with is that Im pretty good at hitting the main notes in a verse but when it comes to the last note of phrase (or any notes held out) I tend to fall right flat of the note. No matter how I seem to manipulate my positioning it doesnt go up. Im really confused about this. Is this a common problem? When you goes hold out a long note where are you feeling it and how do you insure it gets to where it needs to be. This could be a support problem as I dont know really what proper support feels like so I would be doing it wrong. I want to upload my session but we'll see if my iphone allows me. Until then, any advice would be great. Thank you.
  7. I'm a vocalist who has been struggling to get my voice to it's potential but I think I have quite a few hangups on the basics due to all the contradicting information that's our there. What I'd like to know today is where do you feel the pressure in your mouth? I've long since stopped using my throat to sing, so my voice doesn't get tired and I don't experience any pain or anything, but I'm not sure where to aim my voice so that my pitch won't suffer and my tone will sound best. I've read about things such as singing in the mask, but I find that concept too abstract to apply it. Do you place the pressure against your soft palate or your hard palate. And if its the hard palate is it in the dome part or the flat part in front of the teeth. Does the placement change based on style and pitch? I am singing in a screamo band and while my shouts are quite good, I suffer alot with powerful and non-pitchy vocals. If anyone could lay things out for me in an easy to understand fashion, that would be very much appreciated. I plan to upload a recording of me singing sometime in the near future. Thank you:)
  8. Hello everyone! Hope all is well. I come to you today to get your opinion on something that is rather abstract so it might be easy to grasp what I'm talking about at first, but bare with me. I have had what is or is akin to ADHD inattentive all my life. Because of this, I have had a serious issue focusing and buckling down when I need to. When I started singing about a year ago, this condition proved to be a serious obstacle to me improving my voice. Not to mention that I barely had the attention span to sit down for long enough to train, my brain had alot of trouble focusing on pitch and rhythm as well. After singing in a local rock band for a year I have somewhat managed to improve in certain ways, yet I am in a constant motion of one step forward and two steps back. That is except for one thing I've picked up and here is where people are going to start thinking I'm crazy, that is putting light tension in the upper right part of the back of my head. There's actually more to it to that but it would be quicker to explain to how I acquired said technique. Last year, I had a friend who taught me alot about music theory and really helped me get interested and learn alot about how it all works. I don't remember the exact moment but one day as I was focusing on the melody in a song, I felt this weird sensation in my head. The best way to describe it would be to relate it to one of those magic eye pictures where you unfocus your eyes and suddenly see a 3D figure. It basically felt like a mental/audial version of that. In this mode I started clearly hear the movement of sound as if it were in 3D. It was amazing and something I never felt before. For the first month I realized I could do this I tried doing it daily and it did some tremendous things for me. I could speak Japanese with a near native pitch, I could sing on pitch ALOT better and keep rhythm, along with better memory recall and so forth. The problem was though, that this was something I had to initiate. Not something that would stay on automatically. Over time, I got busy with work and the like so I started getting lazy and just went back to learning different voice techniques. Which helped for power,control, and my screaming, but ultimately my pitch suffered when I just relied on my seemingly natural intuition. Recently I by chance got into that mode again and began to try it out and use it along with the other techniques I've been studying and I basically blew myself away. I mean, my pitch isn't perfect but it feels like their is soul and movement in what im singing. While I'm singing I can feel the movement up and down between words and notes and the more I sing the more emotional I become. I didn't mean for this to be that long, so I'll get to the point of this post. First off, I would like to know if anyone has ANY idea what I'm talking about. After getting back into using this technique again recently I have done some research and I know I'm gonna be seen as crazy again here but I think my right parental lobe has been impaired from birth. I came to this conclusion based on the location of the sensation in my head and that the fact that I have dyscalcula and other symptoms common to disorder in that region. I have also read many articles such as this one that support this idea: http://brainmind.com/RightInferiorParietal.html The second part in me mentioning all this is that I want to understand the mental process from someone who doesn't have the issues I do. When you are singing on pitch, what sensations and thoughts are going through your head? Are you, like I am, focusing on a sensation and feelings the notes and words move up and down. I'm wondering if someone can relate to my experiences. Any feedback would be very much appreciate. Thank you to all who read through this long and crazy post. :D
  9. I would like to share and get some feedback on what I feel has been a major breakthrough in my singing. To start off, ive often been told that I have a good voice, but I've had consistant problems with pitch and a lack of tone and resonance. To try an improve on these things, over the past year, I've spent alot of times studying through different programs and reading forums such as this. While I've had a few minor improvements, my voice still seemed like it was off pitch and even if I hit the pitch it was lacking that special something good singers have. It was finally when I started looking more closely at CVI material that I began to start to find more control over my voice, particularlly with my mouth. At first I had alot of issues with fixing the tension in my tounge and my jaw but after practicing day after day I eventually found a sweet spot on my tounge to resonate the note. Now, I don't know if this is usually where people sing/speak and I've had a speech impediment all my life but until recently I was singing in way in which the note would come towards the front of tounge. On top of that, my tounge was not in a relaxed position. But after following the sensation of lifting the back on the tounge and anchoring the front while being concious about vowel sounds my tone has almost completely changed. I sound MUCH more on pitch and profressional sounding than I ever have before. I had been struggling my tone for soo long that this has taken alot of weight off my shoulders. Now, I just have to get used to modifying vowels and working in more metallic modes to add some edge when I sing live. Has anybody had any similar experiences or have any idea what I'm talking about? I have pretty sever ADHD Inattentive so sorry if my writing is all over the place.:cool:
  10. I've been recently reading CVI material while experimenting on my own and I've begun to focus on this sensation that ive been messing with. I THINK its related to CVIs twang but I'm not completely sure. The best way I can describe how I obtain it is I imagine the back of my throat is like a finger and i am curving it up or down. When I curve it upward I get a kind of hard vocal fry and when I pull it back I get a high toned (twang? fry?) If I pull back far enough I feel like the back of my throat is opened and if I do a siren in that position I can go up to c#5 with no tension. I feel like im on the verge of something big but there's still so much I'm so confused about. If any one has any good advice I would very much appreciate it.
  11. Hello everyone. Thanks for all the advice on my last thread. Alot of it was stuff Ive heard before but it helped put things into perspective. My question today is somewhat more specific. The other day when I was at karaoke with a friend, I was doing some vocal fry screams (which ive been doing alot in my band and Im used to) when I randomly tried using the same sensation to sing cleans. I noticed I got a very different sound than when I normally sing. It my voice feel brighter and gave it a kind of edgy rasp at the same time. When I held my breath in the right spot it also seemed to relieve tension as I sang. The next day after karaoke I took some time trying to replicate what I did the night before and was to some degree successful. Though it was hard to understand what I was doing and if I was using probably vocal technique. It almost felt as if I was singing to the back of the throat somewhere around the soft palate. I also noticed that if I mentally lifted my nose the tone became clearer. Pitch also seemed to come out a little better as well. When I usually sing (and it may just be Im singing with bad technique) I feel the air pressure moving forward to vibrate the area around my nasal cavities. This seems to work alright if I sing in a lower bassier voice. But for what Im going for something has always felt off. I know this is alot to digest. And I will post examples of both resonances but for now I would like to better understand what it is Im doing. And which is more correct or not. I always find it interesting when I learn to do something with my voice but it often confuses the heck out of me...:(
  12. Hello everyone. I have been frequenting this forum for about a year now but I've only started posting more recently as I 've started to get deeper into my singing. I am currently a vocalist for a screamoish band in Japan and working hard to improve my vocals. My sound is ok at times but I have often gotten confused or have felt like something is missing from tone and production. Recently, I read something on this forum that I've never heard or thought about before which lead me to wonder how many subtle things about singing that I may be missing. I'm trying to find who said it again, but I read somewhere that many singers often make mistakes about stressing the wrong parts of a phrase and something to the effect that putting power into the last note will help add emotion to the phrase. After playing with this a bit I have started to see some improvement. One of my biggest problems until now has been my falling flat on the last note of the phrase. It made me start to think about all the potential tips like this that are rarely discussed or mentioned. I know this is a bit vague but if possible I would like to hear more singing tips like this that go outside of the convential breath from your diaphragm, sing in the mask, etc. Things, that people might often overlook. Tips relating to enunciation, rhythm, and stress when singing,etc. What unconvential advice would you give to a struggling rock vocalist?
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