And his big manly voice, / Turning again toward childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his sound.William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Shakespeare heard it as a symptom of old age. Heavy metal has used it as a weapon and as a costume, and every so often as a joke, and the falsetto metal singers who used it best always knew which of those they were reaching for. The Lowestoft singer who hauled a falsetto into the British top three in the autumn of 2003, in a catsuit slashed to the navel, was Justin Hawkins of The Darkness, and he reached for all of them at once.
A goldbeater starts with a ribbon of gold and a hammer that starts at some seven pounds and grows heavier still, and he beats the ribbon between sheets of membrane for hours, blow after blow, until a leaf comes off the packet so thin that held up to a window it glows green with the daylight passing through it, and a breath lifts it off the cushion. It is still gold, every grain of it. There is simply almost none of it in any one place.
Falsetto is the voice beaten to leaf: the same folds, the same breath and the same singer, spread so thin that the light comes through. Nothing has been added and nothing taken away. The singer has only stopped putting his weight behind it.
How falsetto metal differs from the full voice
Voice scientists describe two main mechanisms of the larynx. In the first, the one speech and the chest voice run on, the muscle inside each vocal fold is working, the folds are thick, and they meet along their whole depth on every cycle, so each closure is a small hard slap that throws off strong upper harmonics. In the second, which is falsetto, that muscle lets go, the cricothyroid muscle at the front of the larynx tilts the cartilage and stretches the folds long and thin, and only their edges meet, often not completely.
The consequences follow directly. Less closure means fewer harmonics and more breath in the tone, so a falsetto note sounds purer and lighter, and it is far harder to hear over two distorted guitars, which crowd exactly the upper middle band where the full voice keeps its bite. A singer can push a full-voice note louder and louder. Falsetto runs out of room early.
A singer can push a full-voice note louder and louder. Falsetto runs out of room early.
What metal singers mean by the full voice is the first mechanism carried high, often blended toward the second without ever letting go, which is how a tenor keeps weight on a note an octave above the pitch of his own speech. Between the two sits reinforced falsetto, the second mechanism with the folds pressed closer together and the tube above them narrowed to put back some of the bite. It is a real technique and a disputed name.
Hearing the flip
Three tests settle most cases by ear. The first is the break, the small yodel where one mechanism hands the note to the other. The second is weight, whether the note sounds as if it could get any louder. The third is the vowel, which goes pure and round in falsetto because too few harmonics are left to colour it.
The flip itself behaves like a flying fish breaking the surface ahead of a hunting dorado, one instant a heavy body in heavy water, the next a sliver of silver gliding a metre above the waves on fins spread like wings, with nothing under it but air and the hunter still below, until it drops back in and the sea closes over it. A good falsetto entrance carries the same shock. So does the landing.
"I Believe in a Thing Called Love", from Permission to Land, released in July 2003 and a number one album in Britain, builds its hook out of the break itself: a verse strutted out in full voice, then a leap into falsetto so sudden that the join is the thing everybody remembers. Hawkins never disguised the gear change. The gear change was the point, and the video, with its spaceship and its giant crab, only underlined it.
Most metal falsetto is nothing of the kind
Most of what the faithful call falsetto in heavy metal is not falsetto at all. The high tenors of the eighties, the power metal singers who followed them and the air raid siren of the Iron Maiden front man all take their top notes in the full voice or in its reinforced cousin, which is why those notes keep their bite over two guitars and why the break never shows. Put the loudest high note of any of them beside a King Diamond line from the same year and the difference takes a second to hear. One voice has a floor under it. The other is standing on nothing.
The second mechanism is also the gentler of the two. Because the folds meet only at their edges, and sometimes not at all, each cycle is a lighter collision, and a singer whose full voice is spent by the encore can often still place a falsetto line cleanly. It is the register a tired throat keeps longest. Nobody has built a career on that alone.
Falsetto metal from Uriah Heep to the new wave
The band that stacked high falsetto harmonies over a distorted Hammond organ before heavy metal had settled on its own name was Uriah Heep, and "Gypsy", which opened ...Very 'Eavy ...Very 'Umble on Vertigo in June 1970, lays that choir of voices across a riff heavy enough to flatten it. The singer at the front of those harmonies, whose leads slipped up into falsetto at the top of a phrase as casually as other men took a breath, was David Byron. The pedigree of the high harmony in metal starts there.
The one singer who built a whole career on the second mechanism, carrying true falsetto as the main line of record after record and letting a lower voice do the talking in between, is King Diamond, the exponent every falsetto in the music is measured against, and the way his two registers split the characters of his stories is set out in the related chapter. Most of those who copy him copy the face paint. The voice is harder to borrow.
The speed metal singer who pushed his voice above the riffs of Agent Steel on Skeptics Apocalypse, released by Combat in June 1985, with lacerating shrieks that leave the full voice somewhere below and keep climbing past it, was John Cyriis. Over drums at double time a register that thin has almost no body to lose. It cuts or it vanishes, and on that record it cuts.
The Canadian band that split the two halves of a metal voice between two men was 3 Inches of Blood, and on Advance and Vanquish, released by Roadrunner in 2004, Cam Pipes took the falsetto line while Jamie Hooper supplied the harsh screams beneath it, so that "Deadly Sinners" puts the thinnest voice in the band and the roughest side by side on every chorus. Neither could have carried the song alone. The arrangement looks like a gimmick on paper, and on a stage it answers the oldest problem in the register, which is that a falsetto on its own cannot hold a hall. Together they cover the whole throat.
The register came back in the new century along with the records it belonged to. The Arvika band that went straight back to 1983 on Into the Night, released by Heavy Artillery in 2008, and took its choruses up into a thin, bright falsetto over a speed metal pulse was Enforcer, with Olof Wikstrand singing and playing guitar. Nobody in the band was old enough to remember the originals. The voice remembered for them.
A choirmaster knows a falsetto by what is missing at the edges: nothing in it pushes. Put it over two stacks of amplifiers and it either finds the one crack in the wall of sound or it disappears, and there is no third outcome.
Julien Vasseur, KaosMetal
The full voice pushes, and it can push for an hour. Falsetto cannot push at all. It has to be placed, exactly, in the one gap the guitars leave open, which is why it is the part of a metal song most halls leave to the singer, while the parts a room takes for itself belong to gang vocals and crowd chants. The high voice stays with the man who owns it.
