The easiest way for me to achieve this is to think of this like a wheeze. It’s like an asthma induced wheeze when you exercise or have an asthma attack where your throat and airways constrict. I’ve also noticed or think that in Snarky Puppy Land and Lalah Hathaway’s Something, Lalah is having her throat/larynx expanded whilst she’s doing her polyphonic splitting on some notes. It does make some sense as she was at her lower end of her register (her voice on some parts you can hear her voice fry a bit) and it sounded warm. I’ve also managed to sound something similar to some notes by copying her lower notes with an expanded larynx and then using the polyphonic splitting. The higher ones it’s a normal polyphonic spitting.
Awesome video :D You explained everything really well. Coming from beatboxing where everyone talks in vague terms it's really cool to see. Also it's funny how you're in your car always, i'm guessing because you don't want to be heard by others lol
Adding head resonance to vocal fry is exactly how fry screaming is done. It's a difficult technique to get down if you don't know how to throw fry into your singing, but once your voice clicks, you can do it easily.
Dude that was great! I also legit burst out laughing at the demo toward the end because it looked so easy for you to stay in that hypercompressed coordination
Hyper-Compressed Splitting = more convinced 🤩🤩🤩 Die Videoreihe hier ist überaus wertvoll. Es sind kaum RUclipsr:innen zu finden, die einfach ohne bullshit oder um den heißen Brei zu reden ihr Wissen teilen. Danke, danke, danke ♥️
these introductions have been super interesting! thank you for doing this. also would it be possible to elaborate on the whistle scream thingy? i think it‘s quite rad snd something i‘d like to add to my arsenal
At 4:12, is there a chance that you are getting some distortion from the false folds in there too? What you described with the twang, raising the larynx, etc. all can help bring on distortion (as you know), and it just sounded like there was some in there.
Yes, there is a chance! I don't think I felt much distortion there (it's usually hard for me to get it in falsetto) but the false folds are definitely constricted so maybe there's a bit of it in there!
Toni,how you get the higher polyphonic sound in the closed vowel "oo" and "o"? I found it is difficult to get higher polyphonic sound in closed vowel,I just get a lower additional fundamental when I try to produce it.
I would say that on closed vowels, you'd need a bit more pressure (but still a similar flow) because the smaller mouth opening makes for a greater resistance. I actually sometimes struggle to get splitting on closed vowels too, so I think it makes most sense to practice this stuff on a day where splitting in general is very easy (instead of trying to force it on a day where even the open vowels aren't easy to achieve).
O_O lol I think I'll just stick to struggling with regular fry haha, this stuff is fascinating but I still can't quite understand half the technical things you're saying, and my fry scream still sucks, I have no idea what to actually do to fix it XD
Hehe, yeah these splitting effects are a bit out of this world and as they're not related to anything we already can do intuitively, they're also quite hard to teach. By the way, would you say the effect I call death growl is what you do when false cord screaming? :)
Mmmmm it's probably in that family? Hard to know for sure lol, I think I struggle to translate what things should sound like in my anatomy since I'm smaller and more high pitch etc, I don't know if I'm actually doing the same techniques the same way coz I always seem to sound different. Not sure how close I should be able to get, if that makes sense? Some of the sounds you made also sound more like my newer false cord style than the one I used in my cover. One way someone explained to me is my older style is more like "breath distortion" and my newer style is actually using more of my actual false folds. It's all very confusing tbh! Especially with not many small females making similar sounds so I can compare. I think that's my biggest worry about fry too, like am I doing it wrong, or am I stuck with this thin sound because my vocal folds are smaller or whatever it is that causes the higher pitch?? Like even if I can get more consistency, is it all in vain? XD
@@DestroyerMariko Just watched your false cord tutorial, I think it's the same thing as my death growl :) would you say it's the same foundation as what you've used for your Killswitch Engage cover? That one to me sounds like a high falsetto death growl, something that works much better in your voice than mine. Concerning fry I hear many people struggle with projection, and that was also something that took me a lot of time to get, so I guess you can learn to do louder fry screams too. The problem is, there's not really a magical trick to get there, to me it seems like now I'm just succeeding to do the coordinations I tried from very early on, and that just being a tad more efficient and probably having a lucky day made it click once, so from that point on ir was only about getting it consistent and reliable. False cords/death growls are much easier to learn it seems, I guess because they're just building on what we already have (sighing, clearing the throat,...)
Ahahaha yeah I made that for some friends who needed some quick tips, they're better at fry but struggling with FC, it's pretty lazy but thanks for watching! XD The woof style one is what I used for Killswitch, but I don't feel like falsetto doing it, so that's something that always confuses me to hear. Tbh I'm not sure what falsetto really feels like, maybe like the top of my range where there's a subtle not-quite-airy change? But I don't feel like I use it that often, my high vocals seem too "strong" or I dunno how to describe it. I get confused enough whether I should call my highs head voice or some type of mix, I really do find all the conflicting terminology so confusing in the vocal world! I should film something that uses more of that range one day... But yeah, I don't perceive it as having anything to do with my growls tbh, I think I got the tone from just using a LOT of air mostly. What else is happening, I don't know. Now I use more of the "throat singing" tone, seems to help me manage airflow better, so I can do longer passages, and it's also easier to change into high and low sounds. It also changes the sound to be a lot grittier and grumblier though, so it doesn't have that more "pure" sound the woof one gives. Omg I hope I'm not explaining terribly, if it wasn't midnight here I'd be better off just making a quick video probably lol! I definitely think for fry, projection is an issue for me, but sometimes I realise I'm being louder than I thought. Even when that happens though, I mostly hate the tone, and it's very easy to lose it, especially right after I've done lots of singing and FC. I have some public clips on my personal Facebook page (facebook.com/DestroyerMarikoGray) where I just sound like a pterodactyl lol, and there's like the tiniest moment it turns into something nice and then gets shit again the next second. It's very frustrating! But yeah the people I made the microtutorial for actually find fry easier and sound pretty good with very little effort, while I'm still all screechy and scrapey no matter how I play with it, so it just makes me wonder the role of our individual anatomy, particularly for our relatively fragile true folds which I imagine create more variation between us compared to the chunkier false folds where I can get so much lower than I ever thought I should (not knowing much about vocal anatomy tho, I could be way off in this thinking lol). I hope I can work out fry though, there's some things that false cord isn't as good for, I enjoy trying to expand the vocal toolkit. Just maybe not this splitting stuff hahaha, I sometimes play with regular overtones, but this is a whole new area my family probably doesn't need to hear me mucking with during lockdown hahahahahahaha (I probably will at some point tho, can't help myself!) XD
@@DestroyerMariko Yeah, you probably don't start in falsetto for those effects, I just heard some high true fold frequencies in your screaming, so maybe they are doing something fry-ish while you are keeping everything above the true folds vibrating just as for the normal death growl. I've seen your facebook videos, the "pure false cord vs. false cord with grit" thing seems to be about the actual false fold involvement. So while the more "open" approach can be kind of breathy, constricting a bit more and maybe also letting the true folds do fry stuff additionally might make the sound stronger and more sustainable. I guess in my terminology the first one would be an arytenoid-dominant death growl, and the second one would be a false-fold-dominant death growl, maybe in combination with creaking. Complicated, I know :D
For Air Splitting, I feel like I'm just blowing more air through the same "tunnel" that I've had on the clean sound before (the exact placement sensation of which largely depends on the sound colour), and the tension that I feel emerge is just the effort to don't give in to that extra airflow but instead maintain the setting that you had before. Also, keep in mind that placement sensations are highly individual and don't always reflect what is actually happening, often they are just a side effect of how high or bright we sing and might lead to misleading conclusions.
They can, if you produce them inefficiently (by pushing too hard or constricting too much) or if you just overdo them, but that's true for all singing techniques. I wouldn't teach these sounds if I didn't think they can be produced in a healthy way :) I can do all of these effects without irritating my voice, but while I am sure that techniques like false fold distortion and creaking are very sustainable, I haven't sung a whole concert on a splitting sound yet :D so I guess, with most sounds it's more about different amounts of riskiness than it being inherently damaging. Your body will tell you immediately if you're doing something wrong (coughing, getting tired, feeling tense...), and as long as you are honest to yourself and don't ignore these signs, there's no reason to be afraid of experimenting :)
What do you call the technique used on the last sustained note here: ruclips.net/video/zE8uSUWSwfw/видео.html I have only heard this register shift on the same note from two female singers (the other being Celine Dion) where it seems there is only one sound being produced but as the note progresses, you start heating two distinct sounds just as the voice transitions into more of a whistle. Can you think of other examples where this has happened, both male and female?
Hey, it seems to me that this is a very strong overtone from her vowel. Microphones often boost the 1-2kHz range and the strong audible octave above the pitch she's singing is about 1390Hz, so your ear could be fooled by that. So I hear no splitting technique, but you could think of it as a form of overtone singing, even though I doubt that it sounds exactly like that without amplification :)
@@ToniLinke Here you can compare various versions of it, the phenomenon was more present earlier in her career when the register coordination was still intact: ruclips.net/video/Hj_iRGoC_VU/видео.html In the version at 2:48 you can actually hear the microphone amplification going crazy and you can hear the overtone dominate almost immediately.
Yes, I do teach via Skype and Zoom. Polyphonic Splitting techniques are advanced and there's no common way of teaching them other than the ideas I've gathered here, but if you're up to it we can try :) my e-mail is toni.david.linke@t-online.de
Your demos are so freaking perfect.
The easiest way for me to achieve this is to think of this like a wheeze. It’s like an asthma induced wheeze when you exercise or have an asthma attack where your throat and airways constrict.
I’ve also noticed or think that in Snarky Puppy Land and Lalah Hathaway’s Something, Lalah is having her throat/larynx expanded whilst she’s doing her polyphonic splitting on some notes. It does make some sense as she was at her lower end of her register (her voice on some parts you can hear her voice fry a bit) and it sounded warm. I’ve also managed to sound something similar to some notes by copying her lower notes with an expanded larynx and then using the polyphonic splitting. The higher ones it’s a normal polyphonic spitting.
Awesome video :D You explained everything really well. Coming from beatboxing where everyone talks in vague terms it's really cool to see.
Also it's funny how you're in your car always, i'm guessing because you don't want to be heard by others lol
OH MY GOD you can actually do the Lalah Hathaway polyphony - and you are the first one to ever explain the mechanism to me 😍
U r a great teacher.. no body on u tube like u..
This is awesome. I am completely awed by your control.
This channel is a goldmine
Adding head resonance to vocal fry is exactly how fry screaming is done. It's a difficult technique to get down if you don't know how to throw fry into your singing, but once your voice clicks, you can do it easily.
Dude that was great! I also legit burst out laughing at the demo toward the end because it looked so easy for you to stay in that hypercompressed coordination
Thanks! Yeah it's kind of counterintuitive, but once you've found the small "track" where it works it's easy to stay in it
Hyper-Compressed Splitting = more convinced 🤩🤩🤩
Die Videoreihe hier ist überaus wertvoll. Es sind kaum RUclipsr:innen zu finden, die einfach ohne bullshit oder um den heißen Brei zu reden ihr Wissen teilen. Danke, danke, danke ♥️
Brilliant as usual. I've been using this technique without knowing what it was!
By the way, exotic vocal techniques are not only interesting for more avant-garde styles of music, but also for (voice) acting.
Incredible video and explanations - thank you for your time and effort. ⭐
Wow mate, ive just found your channel. You are a real master, your explanations are gold!
Thank you for all your work
Thank you! :)
what the hell that hyper compressed splitting was nuts, like a theremin attached to your throat or something
Haha, have you heard Phil Minton? He does that all the time :D
David lee Roth also seems to do splitting
Yes! Air Splitting!
great tutorial! thanks for uploading
Wow, sounds ghoustly!
Niiice man, you're so talented 🖤
these introductions have been super interesting! thank you for doing this. also would it be possible to elaborate on the whistle scream thingy? i think it‘s quite rad snd something i‘d like to add to my arsenal
I might make a video on whistle in general where I can include whistle screaming later on :)
At 4:12, is there a chance that you are getting some distortion from the false folds in there too? What you described with the twang, raising the larynx, etc. all can help bring on distortion (as you know), and it just sounded like there was some in there.
Yes, there is a chance! I don't think I felt much distortion there (it's usually hard for me to get it in falsetto) but the false folds are definitely constricted so maybe there's a bit of it in there!
Impressive!
Toni,how you get the higher polyphonic sound in the closed vowel "oo" and "o"? I found it is difficult to get higher polyphonic sound in closed vowel,I just get a lower additional fundamental when I try to produce it.
I would say that on closed vowels, you'd need a bit more pressure (but still a similar flow) because the smaller mouth opening makes for a greater resistance. I actually sometimes struggle to get splitting on closed vowels too, so I think it makes most sense to practice this stuff on a day where splitting in general is very easy (instead of trying to force it on a day where even the open vowels aren't easy to achieve).
@@ToniLinke Thank You very much! Your reply are very helpful for me
07:10 out of this world. Sounds like the parallel pitch-shifting demonic possession thing in horror movies :)
Sick video thx
O_O lol I think I'll just stick to struggling with regular fry haha, this stuff is fascinating but I still can't quite understand half the technical things you're saying, and my fry scream still sucks, I have no idea what to actually do to fix it XD
Hehe, yeah these splitting effects are a bit out of this world and as they're not related to anything we already can do intuitively, they're also quite hard to teach. By the way, would you say the effect I call death growl is what you do when false cord screaming? :)
Mmmmm it's probably in that family? Hard to know for sure lol, I think I struggle to translate what things should sound like in my anatomy since I'm smaller and more high pitch etc, I don't know if I'm actually doing the same techniques the same way coz I always seem to sound different. Not sure how close I should be able to get, if that makes sense? Some of the sounds you made also sound more like my newer false cord style than the one I used in my cover. One way someone explained to me is my older style is more like "breath distortion" and my newer style is actually using more of my actual false folds. It's all very confusing tbh! Especially with not many small females making similar sounds so I can compare. I think that's my biggest worry about fry too, like am I doing it wrong, or am I stuck with this thin sound because my vocal folds are smaller or whatever it is that causes the higher pitch?? Like even if I can get more consistency, is it all in vain? XD
@@DestroyerMariko Just watched your false cord tutorial, I think it's the same thing as my death growl :) would you say it's the same foundation as what you've used for your Killswitch Engage cover? That one to me sounds like a high falsetto death growl, something that works much better in your voice than mine.
Concerning fry I hear many people struggle with projection, and that was also something that took me a lot of time to get, so I guess you can learn to do louder fry screams too. The problem is, there's not really a magical trick to get there, to me it seems like now I'm just succeeding to do the coordinations I tried from very early on, and that just being a tad more efficient and probably having a lucky day made it click once, so from that point on ir was only about getting it consistent and reliable. False cords/death growls are much easier to learn it seems, I guess because they're just building on what we already have (sighing, clearing the throat,...)
Ahahaha yeah I made that for some friends who needed some quick tips, they're better at fry but struggling with FC, it's pretty lazy but thanks for watching! XD The woof style one is what I used for Killswitch, but I don't feel like falsetto doing it, so that's something that always confuses me to hear. Tbh I'm not sure what falsetto really feels like, maybe like the top of my range where there's a subtle not-quite-airy change? But I don't feel like I use it that often, my high vocals seem too "strong" or I dunno how to describe it. I get confused enough whether I should call my highs head voice or some type of mix, I really do find all the conflicting terminology so confusing in the vocal world! I should film something that uses more of that range one day... But yeah, I don't perceive it as having anything to do with my growls tbh, I think I got the tone from just using a LOT of air mostly. What else is happening, I don't know. Now I use more of the "throat singing" tone, seems to help me manage airflow better, so I can do longer passages, and it's also easier to change into high and low sounds. It also changes the sound to be a lot grittier and grumblier though, so it doesn't have that more "pure" sound the woof one gives. Omg I hope I'm not explaining terribly, if it wasn't midnight here I'd be better off just making a quick video probably lol!
I definitely think for fry, projection is an issue for me, but sometimes I realise I'm being louder than I thought. Even when that happens though, I mostly hate the tone, and it's very easy to lose it, especially right after I've done lots of singing and FC. I have some public clips on my personal Facebook page (facebook.com/DestroyerMarikoGray) where I just sound like a pterodactyl lol, and there's like the tiniest moment it turns into something nice and then gets shit again the next second. It's very frustrating! But yeah the people I made the microtutorial for actually find fry easier and sound pretty good with very little effort, while I'm still all screechy and scrapey no matter how I play with it, so it just makes me wonder the role of our individual anatomy, particularly for our relatively fragile true folds which I imagine create more variation between us compared to the chunkier false folds where I can get so much lower than I ever thought I should (not knowing much about vocal anatomy tho, I could be way off in this thinking lol). I hope I can work out fry though, there's some things that false cord isn't as good for, I enjoy trying to expand the vocal toolkit. Just maybe not this splitting stuff hahaha, I sometimes play with regular overtones, but this is a whole new area my family probably doesn't need to hear me mucking with during lockdown hahahahahahaha (I probably will at some point tho, can't help myself!) XD
@@DestroyerMariko Yeah, you probably don't start in falsetto for those effects, I just heard some high true fold frequencies in your screaming, so maybe they are doing something fry-ish while you are keeping everything above the true folds vibrating just as for the normal death growl. I've seen your facebook videos, the "pure false cord vs. false cord with grit" thing seems to be about the actual false fold involvement. So while the more "open" approach can be kind of breathy, constricting a bit more and maybe also letting the true folds do fry stuff additionally might make the sound stronger and more sustainable. I guess in my terminology the first one would be an arytenoid-dominant death growl, and the second one would be a false-fold-dominant death growl, maybe in combination with creaking. Complicated, I know :D
10:20 LMFAO
@9:58 was a doggy
Do you have any tips on how to find the correct placement for the tension?
For Air Splitting, I feel like I'm just blowing more air through the same "tunnel" that I've had on the clean sound before (the exact placement sensation of which largely depends on the sound colour), and the tension that I feel emerge is just the effort to don't give in to that extra airflow but instead maintain the setting that you had before. Also, keep in mind that placement sensations are highly individual and don't always reflect what is actually happening, often they are just a side effect of how high or bright we sing and might lead to misleading conclusions.
What a great video! Can these hurt your voice longterm?
They can, if you produce them inefficiently (by pushing too hard or constricting too much) or if you just overdo them, but that's true for all singing techniques. I wouldn't teach these sounds if I didn't think they can be produced in a healthy way :) I can do all of these effects without irritating my voice, but while I am sure that techniques like false fold distortion and creaking are very sustainable, I haven't sung a whole concert on a splitting sound yet :D so I guess, with most sounds it's more about different amounts of riskiness than it being inherently damaging. Your body will tell you immediately if you're doing something wrong (coughing, getting tired, feeling tense...), and as long as you are honest to yourself and don't ignore these signs, there's no reason to be afraid of experimenting :)
@@ToniLinke Alright man thanks! I'll definitely try them out tomorrow when I practice
CONVINCING......
What do you call the technique used on the last sustained note here:
ruclips.net/video/zE8uSUWSwfw/видео.html
I have only heard this register shift on the same note from two female singers (the other being Celine Dion) where it seems there is only one sound being produced but as the note progresses, you start heating two distinct sounds just as the voice transitions into more of a whistle.
Can you think of other examples where this has happened, both male and female?
Hey, it seems to me that this is a very strong overtone from her vowel. Microphones often boost the 1-2kHz range and the strong audible octave above the pitch she's singing is about 1390Hz, so your ear could be fooled by that. So I hear no splitting technique, but you could think of it as a form of overtone singing, even though I doubt that it sounds exactly like that without amplification :)
@@ToniLinke I was thinking the same, the only other example I could find was a specific Celine Dion's "Quand on a que l'amour".
@@ToniLinke Can hear it here as well even though it is less perceptible:
ruclips.net/video/C0wzaDBRWvw/видео.html
@@ToniLinke Here you can compare various versions of it, the phenomenon was more present earlier in her career when the register coordination was still intact: ruclips.net/video/Hj_iRGoC_VU/видео.html
In the version at 2:48 you can actually hear the microphone amplification going crazy and you can hear the overtone dominate almost immediately.
Do you teach lessons? I'd love to learn!
Yes, I do teach via Skype and Zoom. Polyphonic Splitting techniques are advanced and there's no common way of teaching them other than the ideas I've gathered here, but if you're up to it we can try :) my e-mail is toni.david.linke@t-online.de
tell me that u give zoom classes or something please!
I do, that's my job! You can find all infos on toni-linke.com/lessons :)