In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Anyone asking how to do metal vocals meets a disappointment first: the scream everybody wants is the last thing a good teacher lets a pupil near, and the first months go on breath, on quiet notes and on a drinking straw. The vocal coach whose instructional DVD The Zen of Screaming, released in 2005, taught a generation of hardcore and metal screamers to reach the end of a tour with the voice they had started it with was Melissa Cross. Her method, like every sound one, starts well below the throat.
A moonshiner running a copper pot still in a Carolina hollow throws away the first run that drips from the worm, the heads, sharp with acetone and with the methanol that folklore blames for burning out the eyes of drinkers across the county, then catches the hearts, clean and sweet. When the flavour turns, the oily tails start to foul the jug, and he tips those back into the next mash rather than sell them. A voice is run off the same way. The first cold minutes of the day are heads. The last hour of a long night is tails.
Everything that matters is in the hearts. Every drill a teacher sets is meant to widen them.
Breath first, and the lean under the note
The word the old Italian school kept for what a singer does with the breath while the note is sounding is appoggio: the ribs stay open, the belly wall lets go slowly instead of collapsing, and the air arrives at the folds as a steady stream rather than a shove. A metal singer needs it more than a church tenor does, because two guitars and a drum kit invite a shove on every downbeat.
The plainest drill costs nothing. Breathe low into the sides and back, then hiss on a long, even "sss" and count how long the hiss stays level before it wobbles; a beginner often manages fifteen seconds, and the number climbs over weeks. It is the catechism of the whole trade, recited daily, dull to the point of insult. Every singer who lasts has done it.
The first cold minutes of the day are heads. Everything that matters is in the hearts.
The teacher matters more than the drill. A classical teacher who has never heard a distorted note will try to take the grit away, and a rock teacher with no method will hand it over too soon. The Danish teacher whose Complete Vocal Technique, first published as a book in 2000, set out to describe distortion, belting and the other rock sounds in the same terms as classical singing is Cathrine Sadolin, and her school is one of several that now teach grit as a skill rather than a vice. Look for a teacher who can demonstrate the sound and then explain it.
The straw, the trill and the hum
The American voice scientist who named lip trills, tongue trills, humming and phonation through a narrow straw among the five best vocal warm-ups, in a short article for the Journal of Singing in 2001, is Ingo Titze. The straw works because the narrowed exit sends pressure back down the tube toward the folds, which lets them vibrate with less effort and a smaller swing. Singing a siren through it, bottom to top and back, is the gentlest way to wake a voice up.
| Step | What to do | Minutes | What it prepares |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Low breath and a long, level hiss | 3 | Steady airflow |
| 2 | Lip trills on slides up and down | 3 | Easy vibration across the range |
| 3 | Sirens through a narrow straw | 4 | Low effort at the folds |
| 4 | Humming, then humming opened into a vowel | 3 | Resonance in the face |
| 5 | Clean scales in the middle of the range | 5 | The voice the song actually lives in |
| 6 | Light grit on short phrases, only if the rest felt easy | 2 | Distortion on top of support |
Nineteen minutes is not glamorous. Neither is cancelling a tour, and a practitioner who has done both will say which one costs more.
How to do metal vocals with grit
The rasp comes last because it sits on top of everything else. The noise that makes a metal voice sound torn is added in the throat above the true folds, by structures the chapter on heavy metal singing describes, and it only sounds dangerous. Done well it is quiet at the source, loud only through the microphone, and it never hurts. Scratching, burning or a lump in the throat all mean the same thing: stop, go back to clean singing, try again another day.
A tobacco farmer curing a barn of bright leaf raises the heat by degrees across nearly a week, holding it low for days while the green leaf yellows on the sticks, and only then drives the flues hot to dry the lamina and finally the stems. Push the fire too early and the colour sets green for good, no amount of later heat will turn it gold, and the whole barn of leaf goes to the auction floor at a fraction of its price. Grit forced onto an unbuilt clean voice sets the same way. The squeeze becomes the habit.
The singer whose verses on "Eyes of a Stranger", the closing track of Operation: Mindcrime and a single in 1989, sit in a clear middle voice for most of the song before the last chorus is allowed to climb was Geoff Tate of Queensrÿche, and the take is a better lesson in pacing than any exercise sheet. The high notes arrive as a payoff. The middle carries the song.
Why the metal voice goes up at all, over guitars tuned low and played loud, belongs to the wider story, and the physics there repays the reading. A beginner needs only its conclusion: the note that cuts through the band is a bright, well supported one, not the loudest one a throat can produce.
The tenor every beginner tries to copy first, usually on the day he buys his first microphone, is Rob Halford, and the attempt at the top of "Painkiller" has shredded more rehearsal-room voices than anyone will ever count. The useful study is the opposite end: how long the voice sits in its middle, song after song, and how rarely the top is spent. That account runs under Rob Halford's vocal range.
The microphone is the other half of the instrument. Close to the grille a directional microphone lifts the low end of the voice, the proximity effect every engineer knows, and lets a singer deliver weight without pushing for it; pulled back a few centimetres on the loudest notes, it keeps the top from splitting the mix. A singer who learns that distance at rehearsal stops shouting at the stage. The engineer notices first.
Monitors, sleep and the third night
On the road the monitor mix is as dangerous as any scream. A drummer at full barrage, two half stacks and a bass rig will bury a singer's own voice in a small club, and the reflex answer is volume: more air, more squeeze, more strain, set after set, until the voice gives out on the third night of a run. In-ear monitors, earplugs and a wedge actually turned toward the singer are cheaper than a cancelled week.
The rest is unromantic. Sleep, water through the day rather than a glass on the riser, silence on the day after a show, and no shouting over a bar after the set, which can wreck a voice faster than the set did. The folds are small tensile tissue doing thousands of collisions a minute, and they recover the way any tissue recovers, slowly and only when left alone.
Hoarseness that lasts longer than about three weeks, or any sudden loss of voice, is a reason to see a laryngologist, an ear, nose and throat doctor who specialises in the voice, and not a reason to buy a louder monitor. The faithful in the front row forgive a lower key. They do not forgive a cancelled tour.
How to do metal vocals turns out to be the same question as how to sing anything at volume for decades. Breath, then warmth, then the clean middle, then grit laid on top, and the scream last of all, if ever.
The scream is the last lesson. It is also the shortest.
