Vocal Positioning
I think I first tried to sing Outshined when I found the weird ‘stretched’ voice that I had used to get by on War Pigs before I found mix voice. Maybe it’s considered a type of mix, I’m not sure.
Let me start there, I guess. If you make a Kermit sound right now just pretending to be the character, you’ll make a ‘back of the throat’ sound. That’s what I also call ‘operatic’, since it reminds me of male opera singers.
Now try making a witch noise now – a laughing ‘Eeeee-heee-hee!’ screeching witch. For me I scrunch my nose up and show my teeth a little. That’s the opposite end of the spectrum, the ‘forward, nasally’ sound.
If voice acting or cartoon characters don’t resonate with you as much, think of the singers of these bands:
- Alice in Chains – voice sounds whiny, nasally
- Tears for Fears, particularly in ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ – the voice sounds more ‘froggy’ (no insult to any of these bands, I love them all) and sits towards the back
- Tool – this one for me sits more forward, but not nasally like Alice in Chains. Kind of in the middle maybe.
Even if you don’t like my characterizations here, I think you can understand there’s a spectrum of where the voice ‘sits’ when you make a sound.
When I initially tried singing before I took lessons, I never considered trying to bring a sound forward or backward. I just tried to sing the right notes. People would say ‘that’s a good song for your voice’ and really what that meant is that if I sang a note without any intentional shaping it naturally happened to sound similar to an artist that had a similar timbre.
Separately, when I found that ‘stretched’ voice, that squeeze naturally seemed to have a thin sound. When I used it on War Pigs it kind of fit that rock ‘n’ roll style. Here’s an example of what I mean by ‘stretching’ and squeezing out a note instead of supporting a pitch in a healthy way:
I could take that same shape and sing Alice in Chains. I remember starting with ‘Down in a Hole’ and going ‘Whoa, this doesn’t sound too far off from him’ when I tried it out. That’s because I was matching not just the pitch but also accidentally how forward his positioning was.
However, there was an issue with using that ‘stretched’ style – I couldn’t really shape the tone of it. If this was akin to a tone knob on a guitar, I had no way to dial this tone knob slightly back – it was locked in the max state forward.
So back to my first paragraph – when I first tried to sing Outshined, I had to apply this method to hit higher notes, since I hadn’t discovered mix yet. I was so focused and excited on the ability to hit the high note that I didn’t care about the tone yet.
Finding mix, however, solved the tone knob problem. With mix you’re using head voice with power in a proper way, and you have the ability at that point to shape the voice and move the positioning forward or backward. You also have access to resonance, or essentially letting sound vibrate in different parts of your mouth and nasal cavities to do projection for you instead of relying on pushing for volume.
The way I thought about it at the time was a garden hose with some water flowing through it. If you want more pressure you can either turn the valve and allow more water through, or you can use your current flow and pinch the end of the hose.
The ‘stretched’ voice thing I was doing was the equivalent of pinching the hose. Water (voice) sprayed everywhere like I wanted it to, but I didn’t have much control over where the water went, just the fact that it was coming out at the speed (pitch) I wanted it to.
The same analogy can be made with a balloon filled with air. If you let go of the lip, the air will come out naturally. If you squeeze the lip you’ll get a funny high-pitched noise as the air comes out.
With mix, your diaphragmatic support is what’s essentially turning the valve to allow more water through in the first analogy. In the balloon analogy it would be akin to not just letting the air fall out naturally, but pushing on the body of the balloon with constant pressure.
Using more support for mix is what gave me the ability to still let air come through at the right pitch, but to be able to move air around in different areas to find different sounds that fit what I was working on. Back to the guitar analogy – it’s like being able to swap to a guitar’s neck pickup for a warmer, creamier sound vs. the bridge pickup for a brighter, punchier sound.
Outshined
Mid-April 2025 I re-approached Outshined to see if I could sing it better. I could sing some of the lower notes okay, but the higher notes were still hard to hit on pitch with mix. Those were high notes. My body wasn’t used to hitting them outside the stretched method I’d be using before. But the tone sounded much better, and was almost in danger of sounding too far back in some cases. It was nice to have a little more control over it.
After an exhausting series of recordings in April where I made little progress, I decided to start recording video of myself in addition to my sound recordings to see if I could find any other issues that were limiting me.
I knew Nat said my tongue was lifting on high notes and the tongue should be relaxed and sitting on the floor of my mouth instead. I took a make-up lesson with Kaz at the School of Rock and she mentioned I had a lot of tension in my tongue. After watching myself on video and seeing the tongue continue to raise I started doing more warmups before singing – I would do more tongue trills to try and release any tension and massage under my jaw. I tried to find any stretches to help release tension from the shoulders upward. One person on YouTube mentioned scrunching the face as tense as possible and then stretching outward and opening the jaw as much as possible.
Another few weeks went by and still not much progress. One day I realized I was singing really loudly and giving a ton of support to try to get the emotion of the song across, but I was kind of overdoing it – the ‘over-singing’ was actually exhausting me. I figured I would change approaches and practice singing as effortlessly as possible and then dial in the emotion. I’d also forgotten about using resonance to help amplify instead of just ‘pushing’ diaphragmatic support, so I tried to open my mouth a bit more and go for taller shapes. I could tell when I had the perfect shape for the note I was singing by looking at the audio waveform created while I was recording. If I sang “Mystified!” at one note and then opened my mouth wider, showed my teeth, or widened into a smile I could see the recorded waveform get taller at certain points. If I saw it get tall and then die again, I’d go back to that shape where it was tallest and knew that was the perfect resonance point for that note.
This solved the strain from over-singing lower passages, but the high notes were still hard to reach. I worked on more mix voice exercises and read a lot of online forums to get advice. I found some people were using a ‘singing straw’ to warm up the voice. It sounded like bullshit, but after reading up on it, this was called something called a semi-occluded vocal tract exercise and there were studies on its efficacy, so I bought a metal one that you could adjust the pressure on depending on what you needed.
This actually helped me warm up a lot better – I felt a lot looser doing warmups using the singing straw method. I don’t always rely on it now, but at the time I think it helped me develop the technique needed for high notes.
After about 18 weeks of practice, I was finally able to hit some notes without a terrible amount of strain. The highest note was still hit or miss, but I could sing the song well enough to sell it to a karaoke crowd.
Grunge Season
So, as mentioned in the last post, I signed up for the Grunge season hoping that with all of this work and the recent (somewhat successful) high note of “Madhouse” from the Hellfest season that all of the elements were there. Maybe my voice was developed enough for me to sing it without it sounding super strained and terrible. I felt like on a good day I could sing everything well, but I still wasn’t that consistent with pitch.
This was good enough for me, though – I’d have Nat’s help working through the song and I would be singing it every Thursday for band practice, so if the song was good enough for karaoke before we workshopped it, it should be good enough for a real performance by mid-season and even better by the end season shows.
The first time I sang it at band practice I got compliments on it. This was a huge morale boost for me since I was essentially demoing it to other musicians, who are more discerning on pitch, tone, etc. than the average person. The more confident I got singing it, the better it sounded.
When the directors asked us to make a setlist for the mid-season show, a handful of my bandmates voted for Outshined to be the closer and mentioned it was one of our strongest songs. For all of the work I’d put into the song, hearing that was incredibly validating.
Our mid-season show was set to be at the same location we were practicing at (the School of Rock in Broomfield), so that helped with nerves. I knew we’d mostly be playing to musicians from the other groups along with their families, so they’d all be very supportive whether we bombed or not.
I noticed an emotional shift for this show – this was the first time I was more excited than nervous. My inner monologue was actually imagining how well it would go rather than catastrophizing. Maybe I was trusting myself more or believing in myself more.
The day came for the mid-season show, we all got up on stage and did our thing, and we closed with Outshined:
After the show I viewed the recording above and was a little disappointed. This didn’t sound nearly as good as me practicing at home or as good as some rehearsals had gone. I was singing it further ‘back’ than I wanted. But I was still happy with the progress, especially given it was not a song I could feasibly sing 10 months prior. I took note of what I wanted to change with it and tried to bring it more forward and memorize the feeling of keeping it forward so that I didn’t regress when I got up on stage.
The high note was still conditional. Some days it was there, some days it was flat. Some days I’d have a bad vocal break when I tried it, so I’d get gun-shy and sing it softly first and then lean into it if I found it. That didn’t really work well with the aggressive vibe of the song, so I decided to just hit the note dead on and push it with more power and aggression even if I missed the pitch – it was more about selling the emotion than being pitch perfect.
That’s the mentality I took with me to the end season show. And like the mid-season show, I realized that I was still more excited than nervous to perform. This would be my 6th performance of the year (2 per season), and I reflected that every show so far helped me feel more comfortable. This might seem obvious, but the petrified version of me from the first show could not imagine a world in which I wouldn’t be scared shitless to be on stage.
The more experienced version of me could imagine that world, and sang it:
The high note at 3:50 still eluded me, but the other two high notes were decent. My pitch was mostly okay. But it was better than the mid-season show, I was singing more forward, and it was the culmination of almost a year’s worth of practice.
Rebecca filmed this video (and is the WOO! at 1:49), and when I looked at it later I actually was happy with my performance. I didn’t cringe when I watched it, and I wasn’t disappointed. The inner critic in me knows exactly what’s off on every section of this, trust me. But the hard work I put into making this happen this year is something I’m deeply proud of. I showed up for myself, and the trembling, terrified man that was on stage singing War Pigs back in March is nowhere to be found.
What’s Next
I’m sticking with the School of Rock for the upcoming folk season, and still taking weekly lessons with Nat. I’m supplementing some of my weekly lessons with occasional lessons from YouTuber Chris Liepe (he’s in Colorado too and I was able to meet him in person after our first lesson!) and taking metal vocal lessons with Mark from Kardavox Academy.
I’m also working on a side project with some members from School of Rock – so far we’re just doing covers, but I’m open to anything. I’m currently midway through writing my first prog metal song that I hope to add my own metal vocals to once I’m able.