Learning to Scream: A Beginner’s Exploration of False Chords & High Compression

Recently I’ve been working on finding out how my favorite artists are managing vocal distortion. Below is a series of recordings that I ended up recording for a friend of mine to explain some interesting things I found while researching distortion techniques online.

First up, false chord activation & ‘throat singing’ sensations:

Throat singing sensations; false chord engagement.

Afterwards I’m able to play around with similar sensations to achieve a very airy ‘sigh-scream’:

False chord sigh screams

After that I looked at the higher placement screams from Mark in a Kardavox tutorial and tried to achieve a compression-style distortion that requires restriction of air (opposite of what I was doing last demo, which used a ton of unrestricted air flow):

Higher screams with compression

These sounded quite dry and airy instead of the ‘wet’ sound some people are looking for, but I was still able to shape it to get some cool noises:

Shaping compressed scream-noises until they have interesting qualities closer to what we want.

On the last one you can actually hear part of the same false chord ‘throat singing’ vibration that the first audio sample had. There’s a careful balance in between diaphragmatic support, compression, and positioning in the throat that happens to achieve that, although I don’t have much control over it at the moment.

Stay tuned for more progress!

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