Metal vox with link. Critique welcome, and encouraged.

[ForgottenLegacyVox]

Hello all, my name is Joel from PA and I posted this elsewhere on the forum but I may have posted in the wrong forum, so here it is again lol.. I've been singing metal for about 20 years now however I feel I learn something new about the voice everyday. Still trying to improve things, and one of them is vocal distortion. I use it sparingly in my music, but I do use it. Mainly in my mid to lower registers. The problem I have is when I do use it in upper-registers, I lose control of my vibrato and pitch. You can hear my vocals here www.reverbnation.com/forgottenlegacy Any help with this would be kindly appreciated. Honest but fair feedback is always welcome as well.

[DJDeth]

Hi Joel,

Welcome on board. Totally awesome vocals. They remind me a lot of John Cyriis (and I'm sure you hear that a lot:)). Love the tunes too.

If you want to improve your distortion in the higher register, you should search the forum for the terms 'rasp' and 'distortion', you will find a lot of cool discussions.

You should also check out the video of Rob Lunte, the host of this forum, presenting 3 kinds of vocal distortion on his masterclass:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBH4fwl3kNU

Take care!

[Daug Poland]

Yeah. Cool stuff bro. Kick-ass vocals

[Keith]

Awesome!

[slstone]

I hear some Kiske and Tate in those tracks...

[ForgottenLegacyVox]

You're all correct lol. I hear all those "comparable" names you just mentioned. Kiske, Tate, John Cyriis and, Bruce Dickinson. I like to think I don't sound exactly like any of those singers, more a mixture of some of my influences. No worries though, I take all those as being complimentary. Thank you. and thanks for the reference on vocal distortion. I'm gonna check it out now!

[devaitis]

Pure perfection.

[ronws]

Let me draw the wrath of many, yet, again. You've got a voice that works quite well. Don't "fix" it. But if you just have to absolutely try this, I would say read the posts from jonpall and some of his threads. He's made quite the study of rasp or distortion on high notes.

[ForgottenLegacyVox]

ronws, I wouldn't necessarily say that I want to fix anything, it's more along the lines of adding to my repertoire. If there's the one thing I've always wanted to know how to do right, it's vocal distortion. I've had live classical lessons, live rock lessons, and now doing Brette Mannings CD course. He does NOT teach vocal distortion and I sometimes question the course's value to a metal singer like myself. I wanted the course just to "expand my horizons" if you will. Not calling it a bad course at all, it's just a lot different than what I've already been taught and I have to take from it what helps me while weeding out the rest.

Honestly, when I do distortion for a prolonged period of time, I can feel the soft pallet kind of "thicken" up making it harder throughout the course of the night to maintain higher clean notes when I want to go back and forth. And then the next morning, I'm a bit raspy, which I know isn't good for me, and I am never raspy when I sing cleanly.

So it makes me wonder if I'm doing it healthy but not going out of my comfort zone enough to get used to it, or that I'm just doing it completely wrong and damaging my overall voice. This is the one thing nobody has ever taught me.

[ronws]

It sounds like you might benefit from Robert Lunte's overlay distortion.

[Snax]

Just keep on doing whatever it is you have been doing. That rocked!!!

[gno]

Joel - Excellent man! Great vocal performances. Great musicianship. Reading your posts I think it is great that you are investigating the distortion - This forum has some good stuff on this topic. You should not feel it getting progressively more difficult to maintain that rasp throughout the night. Sounds like you might be "grinding flesh" (as Robert calls it) to some degree if you're feeling raspy the next morning. It may be that most of the time you're doing it healthy and you might be irritating the folds just a little bit. You should be able to do all perfectly safe. Robert knows how to do that really well and has a dvd that teaches this. CVT has some great info on it too.