Mythbusters (cont’d)
Someone asked me recently what the biggest myth about extreme vocals is. I didn’t have to think about it: extreme emotion does not make extreme-ly good screams.
Here is what I always recommend: you learn the technique on its own first, with no emotion attached at all. Then the emotion will emerge through technique that doesn’t have to be thought about.
When someone comes to me wanting to learn how to scream, the first thing I tell them is: we’re not going to be screaming here. Forget brutal. Forget violent. Forget loud. We’re going to build the mechanic first: quietly, deliberately, mindfully, with none of the performance results attached to it yet. The performance comes later, when the mechanic isn’t distracting you anymore. You can watch what I mean here.
Most people do the opposite. They try to sound like the feeling before they’ve built anything underneath it to hold that feeling up. That is not sustainable and that’s how voices get hurt.
That’s the order I teach fry screaming in: the mechanic first, with no sound to copy and no emotion attached, then the sound that comes out of it, and only then the performance. It’s what my next live seminar is built on: Fry Screaming, From the Source, Saturday, November 14, at 3 pm Eastern on Zoom. 2.5 hours with Q&A, $129, and every ticket includes the recording if you can’t make it live.
Melissa