hey chris liepe here with special guest lukas magyar from the band veil of maya
if you've been following my channel for any amount of time you know that i do lots of lessons
on singing with grit and distortion and uh some on screaming and my whole reason for doing this
is i'm communicating how to do things safely so you can get the sounds that you want to get sing
with passion sing with distortion and lots of wonderful textures without hurting your voice
so i thought it would be kind of cool to have a guy a professional touring vocalist
who does very extreme things with his voice in the studio and live and hear it from a guy
who's doing it all the time thank you so much for being here lucas sure thanks for having me
and you are offering private lessons you're offering enrollment period here for uh accepting
new students if you're interested in taking private lessons with him and seeing how the vibe
may go click the link below in the video description for a free 10 minute private consult
with lucas space is limited so if you don't see the link there he's all full get in while
you can for an opportunity to spend 10 minutes with lucas and see if you'd like to go further
with him what are your private lessons like the first thing that i do is try to figure
out maybe what their groundwork is what their history is and understand their priorities and
if they have any questions obviously that's one of the first things that i want to cover some
people want to know the basics and kind of need the mechanics explained to them and some people
are already pretty incredible and they just want to learn how to expand on that it's really really
custom tailored to their needs that's that's awesome yes absolutely and that's really
the the only way that you can get that is with private face-to-face engagement so
definitely click that link below free 10-minute private consult if you're all interested
all right is it safe to sing with distortion to scream i mean obviously the answer is yes because
you've made a career out of it but speak into this to all these all these students who are it's just
really and what are some tips that you have for making it safe and still sounding good
yeah so i think we all understand that it's abrasive and it can definitely wear the voice
down when i have students who are just getting into this and are asking me that sort of question
i explain it um and i compare it to like cardio right so your goal is to run 10 miles let's say
on day one you're not going to run 10 miles you just have to start you might only make it a half
mile before you're too exhausted to keep going it really just depends on what your where your cardio
is at in that current time so for me if i want to scream one song but i've never done it before
i'm probably just going to want to start with making the sound in general and experimenting
and trying to figure out how to make that sound and j if we if we keep the running metaphor going
if you are running a half an hour wrong if you're if you're if you have bad shoes or you're not
using good running technique and you haven't been introspective about your stride running in half
an hour may continue to be a challenge but as soon as you get your your technique dialed in
and you you understand how to be introspective and feel out what works in the voice and you have the
right tools that's when you can start progressing beyond uh beyond that that half an hour right
so yeah how does that how do you help guide students to that point because it's not just
about time it's about the right things for the right time at your particular stage yeah so the
first step with someone who's just starting is to get them to understand how to create the sound and
i like to explain it based on the resonation that i'm feeling and how we can move it so there are
certain cues mainly audibly that kind of tell me where the resonation is and where it needs
to go if it's not exactly in the right spot for that particular person and the thing is is there
are different ways of going about screaming there are different textures that we can create so there
isn't just one right way to do it there's actually a multitude of ways to do it and i don't really
use the word wrong way i mean however you want to sound that's how you want to sound yeah it's
just a matter of finding where that resonation needs to be placed in order to create that sound
so many students are they they rely on a sound that another artist is doing and then they they
imitate that and then it doesn't feel so good but they keep going and then they end up hurting
themselves and then they assume that singing with distortion or screaming is just blanketly bad for
your voice but when in fact they have observed this technique and internalized it incorrectly
um and you said that it's it's about finding the resonation and the placement and then moving
forward how do you know if you have the right placement it does get quite tricky because again
if you're very new or inexperienced you can be doing everything right mechanically but not get
the sound that you want so first we find something that is starting to work and then we just slowly
go down that rabbit hole and we have to be a little bit cautious because again it's abrasive
it will wear down your voice we have to take time to build the endurance to where we can actually
really experiment and try different things so once you have a solid foundation
and you can create a particular aggressive sound for an extended period of time then you have
the luxury of really experimenting and seeing you know what how what's your range light there um how
high can you get how low can you get how brutal can you make it how can you make it any louder
so it really kind of depends on what level you're at as a student and i always try to make sure my
students have clear priorities and goals sometimes they don't really have priorities until they work
with me they just want to figure things out but they don't really know the steps of getting there
and then i will gladly help get those priorities in order so if you're trying to do x then in
order to get there we have to do a b c and d yeah and if we check that process it's going to work
so there's this fine line that you have to sort of be aware of that you might be doing something
right and it still may not feel that good but that's because you're not used to it you have to
be trained and train yourself to know the difference between when you're doing something
in a way that if you do it did it for a while it would it would hurt you versus you're doing
something and your voice just isn't used to it enough yet so it's like exploiting bad technique
and getting screwed up versus just knowing how far to push your body as you're figuring things
out and you have to brush in and out of of wrong or or maybe things that are going to be bad for
your voice so that you can find those right right placements you have to be willing to experiment
quite a bit yeah to me it's really the rest time that is going to save you no matter what um
because even if you're executing very efficiently and the sound's there you're doing everything you
want to be able to do the aggressive techniques are going to wear you down regardless yeah
it's just a matter of building that endurance up so listening to the body knowing when to stop and
when hey you know i've put in a good amount of reps today it's time to quit like that is a good
and really a crucial mindset to have when you're trying to do this yeah so how long would you
recommend someone who is wanting to start singing with with heavy distortion or even distortion at
all or screaming how long should they practice these things once they've um once they've gotten
that direction and and found that foundation so if you're able to create the sound and
you've had success there i would try to to utilize that part of your voice one or two days a week
just and listen to the body yeah just one or two days a week and about how long per day
so that really varies just because everyone's different i mean if you're able to do maybe
just start with individual words and lines and if those words and lines are becoming easy for you
then jump into phrases and doing actual like full verses so so break things up use the songs that
you're inspired by to exercise and what you'll find is as you take those steps all of a sudden
you're able to get through a song and what happens when you get through one song well then all of
a sudden you're able to do four or five songs and it continues to compound so it's less about
spend ten minutes a day two times a week it's more but but what i also is is really valuable is that
you're not working on these extreme techniques every day you're giving your body plenty of rest
so yeah one or two days a week and then do things that you're really good at and that
you're really comfortable with your voice to keep the other aspects of your voice healthy i
think it's tempting when people are trying to get into screaming and distortion um to like that's
all you end up working on and then you end up losing other areas of your voice because you're
not keeping those other aspects up what would you say to that um well i think you're really doing
yourself a disservice in two ways because like you said if you neglect other parts of your voice
you're probably going to lose a little bit of the ability there if not a lot of it depending on how
long you neglect it the other thing is that if this if the aggressive techniques are new to you
and you just keep trying to do them day after day what you'll likely have happen
is it gets it really inconsistent and you're going to get frustrated because you're just
going to have these extreme peaks and valleys often and you're never going to feel consistent
because your body is always in a state of just being worn out because there's no rest time yeah
and let's talk about screaming you know full-on screams versus just singing aggressively um
they're they're are they different and i mean obviously they're different in terms of of how
they sound and even how the approach is but do you have different methods for helping students unlock
one versus the other or is it the same approach
for students who want to know how to kind of do both i want to sing aggressively but i also
just want to be able to be aggressive and scream as well yeah i use them together because
the the zones and the resonation placement as we discussed just a moment ago are they're
pretty similar they're not too far off and a little bit of movement goes a long way in
terms of the sound so if you can sing with a good amount of distortion you're pretty close
to that area that's going to unlock just a full screen so you you teach them together they're the
if the student is trying to learn both then yeah i utilize what they're good at to help them get the
the other one down so maybe a student is really good at singing with distortion
and isn't quite sure how to just break into a full screen right yeah i'll be like well listen
when you create this sound that you're already good at if you manipulate that a little bit
you're gonna get the sound that you're going for so you can utilize what you're
already good at that foundation you have to build on something new so a simple exercise
the first thing that someone should do when they're looking to scream sing with
distortion something they can take away from this video and use before they have their first
or their free 10-minute consult with you what would you have them do with their voice it's a
great exercise and many of my students have benefited from this exercise in particular
that's what i call texture exercise because that's essentially what we're talking about how
to utilize our voice and create these different textures yeah so if you are maybe you already are
using your singing voice often and you're trying to figure out how to add more distortion okay well
i start with what you're you're already doing you have your nice clean singing voice
and we can reshape here much by just kind of changing the placement of the tongue
and pull the resonation which in my experience seems to go further back
and then that's where we're going to create vocal distortion
so you are picturing the resonance
go back and resonating more around the soft palate and it sounds like it almost sounds
like it's becoming more nasal too as you're doing that so it's forward
what are you doing with your support as you bring as you bring this mental focus from front to back
so the core support always stays the same or as i was supposed to just be engaged and
controlling the output of the air i don't have to change the engagement of the core
in order to get a different sound that's all changed up here on this this dynamic
resonance placement that you're talking about where it starts forward and goes back
you're doing this with your mind it's a discipline right you have to train your mind to focus
attention and resonance back you're not going to feel it right away you have to train your
mind to know that you feel it as you direct the resonance back because your mind follows your body
which then follows your mind yeah it can be tricky some students do have a little bit of a difficult
time kind of honing in on that so i have other ways of explaining it much with like position here
but i find that most of the students do understand even if they don't already when i talk about the
head resonation most of them kind of get like oh yeah i guess there is a resonation up there and
that's what i pay attention to and because of that and watching myself while manipulating the
tone and texture that's what's allowed me to help teach other students because i'm not just thinking
about the resonation i'm physically moving it with my jaw and mainly with the position of the tongue
okay so yeah you're you're making you're reshaping things to to guide the resonance
back right so if you want to go from clean uh to bringing it back into distorted note
and then going to a full out scream where you're removing the note uh sort of i mean in a matter of
speaking take us there right so if you watch closely you can kind of see if i was just
the tongue is down kind of resting betw um where the where the teeth meet the low gum line and it's
sitting there sometimes it's touching sometimes it's it's not touching that area but it's very
close and relatively flat okay however if you pull it away and a lot of times even just curl
the tip of the tongue and kind of make this bowl shape okay a lot of times that's when that vocal
distortion is going to start to apply so you bring that you bring the tip of your tongue up
and and that helps you direct the resonance even further back yeah i pull it up and back
ah like that can you but it really depends on the level of distortion you're going for like a
full all-out scream like where you you're not you don't have that it's not this it's not this it's
i've got i've got a note in there sort of yeah like you i i want like the
that that sort of sound like how would you how would you do that with what you're talking about
here cool so the the tip of the tongue would be kind of down but also disengaged from the teeth
and the gum lines okay they won't be touching okay and a lot of the times there's this again that
that bowl shape yeah so if i were to go from a clean note into say like a false
chord scream essentially what i'm doing is i have the tongue like this and then i pull it like that
and when i reshape it it reshapes the sound
it's almost like i'm drawing the energy back even further than when i'm doing uh
like that that doesn't feel as far far back that really interesting way to look
at that thank you so much lucas again if you'd like face-to-face lessons with lucas
click that link below for your 10-minute free consult we'll see you for more