3441

I can totally understand, half way through the climb I was hurting pretty bad.

3442

Me 1 Kaiser 0: A department within Kaiser had refused to treat my condition, instead referring me outside of Kaiser to pay for the treatment out of my pocket. I complained to Membership Services and they got it fixed, so I’m back to being treated by Kaiser. I’m so happy because it would have been expensive to get treatment elsewhere.

*no, I won’t disclose my condition but it was still sweet to beat a bureaucracy!

3443

I shared a tender moment with a llama.

3444

Hooray I had my first voice lesson! I have a two and a half octave range, though she thought it was more and I was holding back. E flat to a C by the end of the lesson. Too bad that one was free cause it was a gift and holy shit I cannot pay for more.

3445

Alto? Soprano? Low bass?

3446

She said mezzo soprano.

3447

Is that the C two octaves above middle C? If so, holy shit that only makes you a mezzo?

3448

I have no idea. This is the first real voice lesson I ever took and while I’ve done choir stuff, I never learned to read music. I know it was ridiculously high and I didn’t think I could hit it at first. She said all sopranos should be able to hit a C.

I don’t know which one!

3449

I hope she made sure you knew how to sing from the abdomen and not the throat! Too many vocalist get this wrong for so long they completely blow their voice in just a couple years time of constant practice.

I don’t know how your trainer handled it, but I find that too many vocal coaches put too much emphasis on range alone too early on. This is especially a problem for those that have students sing higher and higher octaves (up until they just can’t do it any more, in an effort to expand range) as they warm up before practice, and the student will start lifting the chin up or straining the neck on high registers in order to achieve them. It takes a diligent vocal coach to stay on the lookout for when you’re doing this.

There is so much more to singing than nailing the highest/lowest notes and performing vocal gymnastics. Things like breathing management, endurance (how long can you sustain a particular note), and simple fullness of sound should come long before vocal range is tackled, because there’s really no point in singing those high notes if you’re doing it wrong. Because vocal range is something so easily quantifiable it’s what a bunch of the hack by-the-hour types focus on in order to prove you’re getting your money’s worth out of the sessions. It’s like the personal trainers at the gym that just want to see you lift more weight before calling it a day.

I know you said that you probably won’t be paying for more lessons, but if you’re interested in taking it more seriously I hope you find a way.

3450

My wife always tells me I need to sing from the abdomen and not the throat, and then I get pissy because I have no idea what the hell that means. HOW do you sing from the abdomen? Explain it in a way that makes sense, because no one can really do that for me.

3451

It would be easier if I were standing there with you, I’m not sure I’ll do a good job explaining this but I can try:

This will feel completely inefficient at first, because it will feel like you’re blowing a ton of air out (you’ll learn to manage it), but it might help you get a feel for what the difference is: When singing, try to sing as though you are singing through a yawn,. Just whoosh the air out, as much as it takes, to hit those high notes without constricting your throat to any huge degree, or lifting or tilting your head in the process (which is a cheap way to manipulate/tighten the vocal chords). You don’t just want to completely exhale, but supply enough air to the note so that your throat feels as though it is wide open as you sing.

When your throat starts to constrict (typically when you tilt your head to aim for high notes) you have to fight against that, just keep it relaxed, and wide open (no jokes here plz). You’ll notice at first that it might feel impossible to reach those high notes when you do this, because it’s natural to want to use the throat to squeak out the top end stuff.

Instead of constricting the throat you need to learn to push the air out with more force. You’ll know when you’ve been doing it right for an hour because your abdomen will feel just plain worn out, like you’ve just done a bunch of sit-ups. You need to push from the stomach, hard on a regular basis to build up this type of endurance.

At first your vocal range might seem like it shrunk, which isn’t exactly true. It was never as high as you thought because you weren’t doing it right in the first place. Although you could produce sound at a certain octave, it wasn’t properly performed, and can damage the throat over time.

If you’ve ever screamed and yelled, at a ball game or concert or whatever, and your throat hurts after wards, it is because you were doing it from the throat. Next time try to bellow, a deep bellowing yell like you’ve been punched in the gut.

3452

She actually ran me through a gambit of breathing exercises that made me need to sit down at one point because I got seriously dizzy trying to do it correctly. She was very keen on me not straining my voice and we talked about how the ‘head voice’ should sound and feel and how the ‘chest voice’ should sound and feel and every time it sounded like I was straining she made me stop and redo it. Same if I snuck any ‘h’ sounds into my vowels or if I was moving/tensing my jaw. The only reason she covered my range was just first to see about where I was, and then because I specifically asked since I always go audition for things and I never have any idea what to tell them when they ask.

I’d really like to take more, but it’s $499 for ten hour long lessons. The only reason I did this one was cause it was a birthday present from last year that I’d been too chicken to take until now.

3453

kerzain, that’s a way more thorough explanation than I’ve ever gotten from anyone, so thank you. I’ll read that again and try it out when I’m sober.

3454

Oh, one thing she taught me that was really cool was to put your hand lightly on your throat when you sing high stuff. The high notes should just be air passing through with no vibration. I never knew this.

3455

Yea, I’m glad she covered all that stuff. I doubt she expected you to memorize everything, but it is all food for thought and gives you an idea of what to research, practice and thinking about while singing.

I might have come across like I thought you were being ripped off, but I get weary of all personal trainer types that aren’t there to help the person so much as draw the student into another session. And big red flags for me are when they place too much importance on any one particular aspect of what they teach, most notably whatever can be easiest measured for improvement.

It sounds like she gave you a lot of really good things to pay attention to when you sing, because those are all cues that you’re blowing it. Although today’s rock gods and pop goddesses might have some great sounding music, half of them can’t even speak without sounding hoarse and raspy because they had been doing it wrong for so long, and it’s easier to just keep doing it that way than to take the time to get it right after the fact. This happens a lot of child stars, it isn’t just the singing that makes them talk like frogs as they get older, but the fact they’re singing wrong (in a way that produces the easiest and most substantial results for little effort). But the results and gains were ill-gotten ones.

Mile Cyrus, Britney Spears, James Hetfield, Glenn Danzig, they can barely even speak without a hint of sand-paper voice bleeding into their words or songs, but you take someone like Barbra Streisand or Diana Ross or Smokey Robinson, and they were knocking socks off decades after they hit the scene, with their voices as strong as ever.

3456

The question though, “Is it possible to sound as awesome as Hetfield in his prime if you are singing correctly?” I mean, could Hetfield, with vocal training, have sounded the same without blowing out his voice, or is the unique vocal styling of rocking out only achievable through throat-singing?

3457

That’s a great question… because, no it probably isn’t possible.

He sounded so good specifically because he growled as he sang. The result sounds great, but the ability to do that is short lived and really fucking hard on the body. One day, after a decade of singing like this, he blew his voice during a recording session for the song So What back in 1991 or 1992 or something. And he hasn’t been able to get back to that sound in the years since. And because it took him so long to finally get around to taking proper vocal training you can hear how destroyed his voice was during concerts in the late 90’s and early 2000’s (just listen to the album St. Anger for a perfect example of this, or Death Magnetic if you want to hear auto-tuners help supplement some of his singing). His screaming is coming back though, little by little, because he’s taken lessons from a couple screamer-teachers. But he’ll never sound like he did 20 years ago.

Although he might have been able to outright scream (rather than growl) through the 80’s (with proper technique) it wouldn’t have sounded like his trademark screaming – but then we may not have had to suffer through 15 years of jagged throat clenching death every time he tried to perform an older song, like Creeping death, live in the last decade or more.

3458

I don’t understand how this is physically possible. Sound is vibration.

3459

I’m assuming that the vibration necessary for those notes should be imperceptible if done properly.

3460

You may be a troll on occasion, but thank you for this little tidbit. It’s a bit of Metallica history I hadn’t heard, and it’s really cool.

Even less sober now, so gonna give that whole stomach singing thing a shot later. Results to be posted.