Reclaiming Music
Around this time last year I was looking around for vocal lessons. I’d tried some lessons at the Colorado Music Institute in Centennial the summer prior, but the commute there after work was pretty rough and I ended up cancelling after a couple of months.
I’d originally signed up for vocal lessons because I had lateral epicondylitis (tennis elbow) in my left arm, likely from a combination of obsessive guitar practice combined with a few skiing trips that irritated similar muscles when gripping my ski pole. And that obsessive guitar practice itself came from a realization that I’d spent too long abandoning my music passion in favor of my career (I took a break from music in 2016 when I moved to Chicago from Hattiesburg, Mississippi for a new software engineering job).
So in the emotion of feeling ‘behind’ on the abandoned passion I bought a new guitar, practiced too much and hurt myself, then took a break. I waited far too long to go to a physical therapist to address the issue.
Annoyed and restless (and still with a wounded left arm that left me unable to continue with guitar), I decided to try again to find something musical to do while I waited for my arm to recover.
Finding School of Rock
I searched online and found a ‘School of Rock’ franchise nearby in Broomfield, Colorado, but assumed it was for kids. Out of curiosity I checked to see if they had an adult program, and to my surprise they did!
On December 10th of last year I reached out, and my first 30-minute trial lesson with somebody named Nat was scheduled for the 19th.
The location was perfect. Not only was the setup fantastic (3 different performance rooms, plenty of practice rooms, loads of flyers on the walls from past performances that highlighted their experience), it was a 10-minute drive from my house and away from the evening traffic.
I remember that first trial lesson I had with Nat. I was pretty nervous and still not comfortable with singing in front of people, especially when struggling to hit notes while someone watched. It felt vulnerable. I have always had a good ear for pitch so I am painfully aware of mistakes I make the moment I make them, and it was embarrassing.
Nat did a great job of disarming me and making the lesson feel fun and exciting. She started me with vocal warmups to a guided piano scale, and the mistakes I made and squirmed uncomfortably on she laughed off and mentioned not to worry about. “It’s was a warm-up after all!”
After warmups we ran through a few songs that I knew to help her understand the experience level I was at. She mentioned she thought I had a great voice (which at the time I didn’t internalize – I figured it’s something all teachers tell to aspiring students to make sure they don’t give up) and that we could work on range, which was a goal of mine.
My self-made definition of vocal range was ‘the lowest to highest notes you can hit with power.’ At the time I considered it around two octaves – F#2 to F#4. This wasn’t counting head voice (or falsetto, which is what I called it at the time), which was very airy and sounded very ‘Mickey Mouse’-esque, so I didn’t consider it to be technically in range:
After the lesson I was asked if I was also joining one of the adult performance groups. I hadn’t heard of that, but after they mentioned that Thursdays would be ‘Guitar Gods’ and finding out the group met right after my vocal lessons ended, I signed up for it on the spot.
Performance Based Education
Since my trial lesson was December 19th, the first lesson and group meetup wouldn’t be until after the holidays. Until then, we could submit songs that we wanted interest in covering. I remember choosing ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath as my first song after listening to the Brass Against version, not realizing the first song you list is supposed to be the song you want to play the most with your primary instrument (somebody else had also listed ‘War Pigs’ so I just wanted to show I also liked their choice). I was also singing the Brass Against version an octave lower, so I panicked a few weeks later when I found out I was singing lead on the original Black Sabbath version that I didn’t have the range to sing. Ozzy sang an A4 on the “politicians hide themselves away” line, which I had no way of reaching from chest voice. I kept singing it and trying to hit it by jumping to falsetto on that note, but it sounded terrible compared to the power he was hitting it with.
During my first full lesson in mid-January 2025 I asked Nat if there was a way we could shift the entire song to a different key so that I could sing it, and told her I was worried about performing it in front of people. She confidently told me she believed I could hit that note and we’d work on it. I wasn’t convinced, and my first adult band meetup was right after our lesson.
I met the adult band group and immediately felt at home. There were a range of folks with different backgrounds, jobs, ages, and music tastes, and some looked as shy and nervous as I felt. Everybody was there to learn. I had to play bass on one of the assigned songs, “For the Love of God” by Steve Vai, and immediately felt and leaned into the groove set by the drummer, a guy named Derrick. I zoned out a bit to the groove as I watched two guitarists, Katie and Mason, toggle between difficult guitar parts. And to my surprise, one of the directors of the show, Patrick, stood in for a guitarist who was out that week (Tom) and absolutely shredded a 3rd guitar section seemingly improvised.
Feedback was given on each section on parts we could improve, and we moved on to the next song. The format seemed great. Folks were driven to show up for lessons since they were paying for them, so they generally had their parts down (rather than trying to wrangle bandmates that might not take practice as seriously, a past experience).
I forget at which point I had to sing War Pigs that night, but I know I somehow made my way through it and found a nasally way to sing the highest note with a very stretched sound. Fortunately the intro and outro of the song were within my range and fairly powerful, so all that remained was trying to get the verses to not sound so strained.
Another song we played that night was Manic Depression by Jimi Hendrix. That one was comfortably in my vocal range and I was able to add a bit of Jimi’s vocal quality to it (a running gag in my family is me making Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan impressions). The song itself was a difficult one to work out rhythmically. Everybody seemed to struggle with it during the first few sessions, which made me feel better (I wasn’t just around superhuman musicians that could do anything).
Practice continued over the next 5 weeks. Our first show was set to be at Rails End Beer Company on March 7, 2025, and that date was coming uncomfortably fast. I felt good on every song but War Pigs, which I was still singing in my ‘cheat’ way that was very vocally taxing but got the job done. Nat (and another teacher named Kaz) were trying to teach me about the concept of finding ‘mix’, or a blend between chest voice and head voice that adds more power to notes in my head voice range. Some pieces of it were landing, and funny exercises here and there (like plugging my nose when I tried to sing) were slowly dialing in the concept.
Something was still inaccessible there, though. Nat was able to hit a head voice note and slowly transition from airy, soft all the way to seamlessly switching to the ‘mix’ feel that added an incredible amount of power, almost like turning both a volume knob and a tone knob on a guitar at the same time. I would start the same note in head voice and add more power until I hit a vocal break and lost it. Something just wasn’t clicking still. But one day it seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
Mix Voice
My setup for practice is kind of odd. I found a closet in the basement of the house we’d recently moved into and I set up a cube of moving blankets to create a makeshift studio:
Kind of amateur, but it worked. It’s here that I spent countless hours making very strange and odd noises in an attempt to understand ‘forward’ vs ‘backward’ vocal positioning, dial in ‘nasal’ tones, and work on the elusive mix voice.
I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I know when. February 28th, 2025.
After about 6 weeks of constant practice with the same warm-ups, scales, and going through this guy’s YouTube video literally 40+ days in a row, I finally hit a ‘mixed’ note.
I was in the car and on my way to drop off Rebecca’s skis at Christy Sports. I decided to put on Dream Theater’s Pull Me Under and see if I could sing the ‘watch the sparrow falling’ phrase using that strained, stretchy technique I cheated with in War Pigs. That technique worked to hit some high notes in the past, but after a few times my voice would be fatigued for the rest of the day and it was clearly an incorrect technique.
After failing to hit the note a few times I said out loud to myself in the car, “Ugh. So it’s like falsetto…” and made an “Ooooooo” noise. “…but you somehow add more power to it…”
I made the ‘oooo’ noise softly and then tried getting loud and louder, using my diaphragm to support as best as I could. Essentially like dynamics on a piano where you try to play soft then louder and louder, but as gradually as possible.
Something finally clicked as I tried this. I hit a higher head voice note with power without that stretched, strained noise. I actually said, “Holy shit. That was it. I think. I need to remember what this feels like.”
As soon as I got home I ran to the basement and recorded my thoughts. Here’s what I recorded:
I made the recording just for myself, so I didn’t try and explain it in a perfect way for other people. But maybe it’ll help you out if you can bear through my strange noises. The last 10 or so seconds of this recording is where the feeling of ‘mix’ clicked; I was singing notes that I can actually access in chest range, but singing them from mix instead.
The way I explained it to others was it’s like shifting gears on a manual vehicle. If you are on the acceleration lane to enter the interstate and you remain in a lower gear and slam the gas, you’ll rev the engine and won’t pick up speed as well as you would if you shift up to a gear that matches the speed you want to move at.
The analog for me is that I had been trying to use my chest range (2nd gear) on the interstate where I should be in the highest gear (mix voice). In those cases your voice will sound super strained as you try to anatomically force a position you haven’t shifted to yet.
You can shift gradually as you accelerate (preferred and feels/sounds the smoothest for both cars and the voice), or you can sometimes switch a little earlier than you should (but not too early or the engine will lug / you may hear a vocal break).
In my recording above I’ve gone into mix when I technically could have stayed in the ‘gear’ right below it, but still close enough to where I’m at that it doesn’t feel or sound unpleasant. But the key is that once you’re in that higher gear and singing from a different area than the chest voice (it doesn’t feel natural to me and it doesn’t feel the same as singing from your natural speaking voice/chest voice area), you can then add power to any note you have access to via head voice.
So once you learn mix voice, your “range” (in my definition from earlier that includes what you can sing powerfully)becomes your lowest note plus your highest head voice note. Or to put it differently, once you find mix voice any note you can sing with ‘falsetto’ you can also sing with the power of your chest voice.
(Side note – I have deleted ‘falsetto’ from my vocabulary and only use chest, mix, and head voice for now to keep things simple. Too much conflicting advice out there.)
If you sing a note in chest voice and then sing a high note in head voice (the ‘Mickey Mouse’ voice), you can feel (close your eyes and try to feel the sensations) the disconnection between the two voices. There’s somewhat of a ‘clutch’ (to continue along the car metaphor) where you feel yourself letting go of the chestier feel to switch to the head voice feel. There’s an extra setting in between full head voice that allows you to put more power in.
As far as how you access it, I’m not convinced it’s purely technique. It feels like I was doing the same thing every day for weeks on end until one day it was just available, so part of me thinks that you have to keep building up vocal muscle memory and endurance to even find it. I’m glad I didn’t give up one month in.
After I got more comfortable with mix voice I ran through my entire discography of music. “Can I sing this one now without using a capo?” “Wait, can I sing Somebody to Love?” “Do I have the range for the high note in “Long Time” by Boston?” It was a wild and magical feeling running through songs I’d always sang an octave lower and suddenly being able to sing it in the original key.
But for now, I’d try and apply it to War Pigs, since mid-season was upon us.
The First Show
The mid-season show, to me, was absolutely nerve-wracking. I couldn’t even talk to Rebecca the day of my show since I was so nervous and distracted. I tried to meditate but every time my mind got quiet I imagined all of the ways I’d fuck up. Wrong notes, forgotten lyrics, turning bright red on stage, maybe frozen with stage fright.
The show itself was not fun, at all. I was completely mortified. My first song was Manic Depression. Early on we stumbled but somehow we caught the mistake and kept on with the audience none-the-wiser. After that song I felt a little better, but all I could focus on was the upcoming bass song (For the Love of God) and how many times we changed the format. I was convinced I would fuck up there and play the wrong section and throw everybody off.
While playing For the Love of God I realized towards the very end that War Pigs was next. I panicked and almost forgot what section to play then. My brain was anxiety-ridden and I kept telling myself “get through this song first, one thing at a time.” We made it through that one with no mistakes.
Next up was War Pigs. For a first time lead singer, this was an absolute terror to sing. The song is so recognizable and loved, and then all instruments drop out except for the ticking of the high-hat. Everybody knows the upcoming words. The singer is heavily highlighted in the intro, the exact opposite of what I wanted in that moment.
I remembered looking at my trembling hands before getting up on stage and recalling when I had to read my English paper to the class in 8th grade and was so nervous you could see the paper in my hand shaking. I remembered having to memorize and speak a quote for a 5th grade performance and then freezing and forgetting it entirely the moment I realized everyone in the auditorium was looking at me, and then turning to my teacher who mouthed the words to me to help me continue.
I remembered the live version of War Pigs I’d watched just before the show to give myself inspiration. Unfortunately, in it Ozzy screwed up the intro and made up nonsensical lyrics. That didn’t help my nerves.
“Just remember the first words,” I remember telling myself. I sang the first bit, the audience cheered in recognition, and we were off. Most of the rest of it was autopilot. I finished it with no real mistakes other than being pitchy here and there:
Post Mid-Season Performance
I was somewhat happy with the performance (I was very critical of the recording and how pitchy I was in sections), but I mostly was frustrated with how shaken I was at having to perform in front of people. I had picked my fingernails so short I was bleeding on some fingers. At that point the idea of even considering an end season show was not feasible. But the cheering and camaraderie of everyone after helped. The social community was becoming a lot more tight-knit. Others expressed their fears and anxieties around stage performance and it helped me feel more normal.
Rebecca recorded the War Pigs video above, and I decided to upload it to YouTube. I looked at past videos on my channel. The last video I’d had on YouTube was me singing a cover of Coil by Opeth in 2013:
12 years. 12 years since I’d abandoned music to focus on my career. And finally, the streak between video uploads was broken with a performance of War Pigs.