Hey guys welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy where the proof is
in the singing. I'm continuing my series on How To Sing
Like, next up Chris Cornell. If you don't mind,
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and I have a singing course, that course is called How to Sing Better
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for any of you guys out there interested in learning how to sing or learning how
to get a lot better at singing. I also have a free singing forums on my
website so there's close to 20,000 people in there now, a lot of singers
in there, talking about different styles of music
and how to get to these great places so. I want to dive right into Chris and I'm
actually just going to play some stuff that I've sung. Now
I'm doing most all this stuff based on you know
actually me doing it and/or me and my students doing it,
to showcase you guys, to you guys, the different techniques involved in doing
this which I cover all of this in my singing course so
we'll fire it up and we'll talk about it as we go and let's do this.
Cool so as you can tell right out of the gate man Chris is
full throttle Chris and he has a lot of really great range and some
killer tone. Now there's a lot of aspects about Chris's voice that I find
fascinating and let me just kind of break them down for you
so I can start to get into some of the technical aspects themselves.
Number one, he seemed like a singer born out of his time. Now I think he's only a
year younger than me or something like that. I
forget I have to look it up but, or was and God rest his soul like I said big
ligh, a big light went out, a big loss for us for that,
with that guy so but and that is this, the first thing is that he kind of
born out a time, he seemed like a singer that kind of
should have been popular in the 80s because of his singing style,
his range, his distortion, his power, his energy,
his stamina, all those things so to have classified him as a grunge singer,
I think that's a little misleading, a little unfair because
personally I think he was more like somewhere between
you know a high range maybe Paul Rodgers/David Coverdale, Ian Gillen
maybe even Ray Gillen I don't know if you guys know who Ray Gillan is from
Badlands. We also lost him really early but just a
really great high belting, distorted, high range singer
and so here he was you could almost kind of feel like
he was you know avoiding being tagged as an 80s metal singer so he was
okay kind of with the grunge stigma or the grunge you know name if, if
you will but then later he kind of got tired of
the grunge name because I think he looked at a lot of the grunge bands
and he didn't really associate himself with the grunge bands so that was kind
of little you know distancing that he did from
them as well. I think you know you know Layne Staley and some
others that were categorized like that felt very similar. So I bring that up
because it's sort of like a man without a country but he cut his own path
and that's also really interesting. So he was sort of the the quintessential
example of the high range belting 80s metal singer kind of
classified as a grunge singer so to speak.
I know it might sound weird but it's kind of really how I see it.
So with that said now he compresses his sound a lot.
Because of the grunge era and I'm not sure if this is what influenced him to
do this but probably, Eddie Vedder sort of
really coined the sound of covering your vowel so (sings)
what we call marble mouth and and yes
you know we know there's been other singers in the past that have done that,
a lot of pop guys you know you think of (sings)
right you think of different singers that have done that but he, but Eddie
Vedder really sort of you know invented that in a
way that in order to kind of call yourself a
modern singer as a male especially, you had to cover
your sounds like that so and again like I said I know it goes
all the way back to other singers that have used it before,
but he certainly drove it home and made a lot of people do it. So with that said
you know you have Chris covering his sounds and, and fitting into
the grunge thing right and by the way when I used Tom Petty as
an example, he wasn't the only guy that did it, there were others that did it
you know but he, he for his time was one of the guys that you know also
marbleized that for his generation just like Eddie Vedder did throughout
you know, even today people are still covering their vowel sounds
but that's a very dangerous thing to do because as you cover the sound on the
bottom, it's really hard to reopen that sound
and go up. Now I don't care if you listen to say "Hello To Heaven"
or you know "Cochise" or any of the songs that Chris has done with a lot of range
in it, if you listen to him go back up up top,
he opens up his sound in order to get to those
vowels. He doesn't go you know (sings)
he's really open on the sound, it's the only way to get to the sound so.
Let me play a little bit more and play a little more of my clip here
and then I'll talk about his his distortion, his compression and so forth
so here we go.
I wish I had a better track to work with
this instrumental track wasn't that great unfortunately.
Now notice again (sings) right. It's (sounds)
so just think of like singing with a lot of Rs. Everything I try to do
has kind of an R to it right R, like marble mouth it's called rolling your
r's like they do in Spanish. (sounds)
right so it's rrr everything in that's in this context.
Okay now, as we go through this more, I want to talk about the way he compressed
his, his air. I compress my air a little, a
lot differently than Chris did and that's really an
important distinction because I've seen Chris on a lot of live
shows and as fantastic of a singer he is,
sometimes he was on, sometimes he wasn't as on
and there should have been a little more consistency to that and a lot of that
has to do with you know (sings)
and compressing everything right here by squeezing the throat off to get that
distortion right, to get that sound. Now he did take a lot of vocal lessons
from a really well-known vocal coach, I actually studied with although,
also for a lot of years, who helped him quite a bit, get some better open throat
technique and so you hear him going back and forth
like you know he'd go out, go out on a few shows and he'd have some
good open throat technique and then he'd kind of revert back to old habits. Now
a lot of us do this if we haven't you know been consistent with our training
and are willing to stay disciplined in doing that
so if we have an old habit, we have a tendency to go back to what we know
worked for us but over time when it stops working for
us, in our minds we think well we're going to keep
redoing this old habit because it worked for us in the past and we think it's
going to work for us in the future and it doesn't so we've got to be really,
really careful of that but anyway so really concentrate on (sings)
right, you want to first kind of lean into that sound with a good open
throat sound first, instead of (sings), instead of doing that. Now a lot
of people get confused by thinking that they're going to use
fry to be their savior of how they're going
to understand how to get to distortion. In fact there's a lot of Zen people out
there that do this and I've had to fix a lot of voices from that which is a
bummer because a lot of people are hurting themselves as a direct result of
that and, and what it is is (sounds) you know (sounds) you
start with frying (sounds) but you know what you're going to
experience. Here's a telltale to whether you know you're doing that
right or not. You're going to feel a tickle in your throat and it's going
to be a tickle that kind of makes you feel like you want to cough
okay and when that happens, that's wrong. It's wrong because what you're doing is
you're agitating the chords, you're agitating the throat
and you're going to start to build inflammation. It's just the way it is.
If you smack yourself on the on the arm or the wrist,
it's going to start to swell up because you're agitating it. If you
bump into something or you're hitting your knee on a countertop or an
end table, it's going to swell up because you're agitating it,
inflammation will build. Well the chords are no different so we have to be really
really careful on this inflammation so as you start to get this
feeling, this tickle feeling or feeling like you're going to cough,
you're literally agitating the throat and that's going to cause the folds to
to swell up ,it's going to cause your throat to swell up, possibly the trachea
to swell up, like all different things like and not, a lot of not good
is going to result from that. So we build open throat technique first like I cover
in my course and we start clean (sounds) and then
(sounds) right. Now I have a couple of videos on
how to sing with distortion for you guys that are interested I
suggest, I'll put those in the description I
suggest you check them out first so you can see what I'm talking about, about
little by little, leaning into a sound more and more.
Now everybody's different at their growth stages on how they're doing this
and their age plays a different, a huge role, their amount of
diaphragmatic supports plays a gigantic role, like all these different things
play a huge role so I cover all that in my singing course as well.
So I say that because I want to be really clear so you guys don't hurt
yourself but in order to obtain and get this kind
of tone and this quality, it wasn't only his belting register
with his distortion that made it cool, he was able to back off that percentage
of distortion and use it in some of his quieter stuff which I'm going to
showcase in a minute so. Anyway let's continue.
Now in this part he's actually, he's, he's actually using a
glut of air and then compressing the air, kind of like he would if he was to
to distort his voice but instead of allowing the folds themselves
to get good closure (sings) right
so he's kind of holding his breath and talking like this or singing like this
and in a second he's going to use his or I'm going to
as a demonstration of Chris, use my false vocal folds
combined with that sound and compressing the air, to relax the chords
into that kind of rattlesnake sort of sound that eventually becomes what
people actually get growl and scream from ultimately but in this case just
a lot of hyper glottal compression so check this out,
Right here.
Okay so anyway and then I go into you know "Show Me How To Live" in a minute
but I'll put again the full length versions of these so you can check these
out in the description because I want to get through some more stuff so.
Now when I just talked about using that tone
for lower register stuff, I want you to check this out because he does this here,
not here, hold on I have this "You Know My Name" I'm gonna get to that one in a
minute. He does it here "Black Hole Sun" so check out the tone
here.
Okay so again (sings)
right so I'm, I'm, like i said I'm compressing the air at the glottis
but I start from an open throat position and I'm also constricting or compressing
air at the base of the neck and in the lung
so it's not just one thing or another and if you notice, I'm not straining, you notice
I have a crystal clear speaking voice after this and I've been doing a lot of
demonstrations and singing all day so you know if you're not doing this
correctly you're also going to notice you go, you get raspy and hoarse and you
know (sounds) you kind of hardly can talk after. I
don't do that because I know how to do this correctly
and I know how to rehabilitate myself and warm myself
back up to a clean tone in order to keep that from happening so let's continue.
Now on those kind of notes I call them bedroom voice (sings)
that is a form of fry and then I open up into the sound (sings)
I'm gonna whine at you but it's cool
right basically and so that's sort of how we get into that place
as well okay. Now I'm gonna move on because I wanted to go ahead and show
you one of my female artists doing this.
This is Kati. This was of her own volition, she just wanted to do this on her
own so instead of me playing my version of
"Show Me How To Live", I'm going to show you her, her version. She did a great job.
Now what's cool about this, it's kind of ironic actually
is, for the most part, most of the world, I should say that if we're to look at a
pie of male singers in throughout the world,
most of them have gone the Sam Smith route. You know the real
gentle R&B, I don't want to call it wimpy because that's a
that's not a nice thing to say but just, not a powerful kind of sound at all, just
a very light, R&B kind of sound and chicks want to rock man,
I get hit up by a lot of girls, by the way, you know these,
you know you say, well why do you have all these girls that are coming to you
and you know singing all these you know bad a kind of songs or whatever,
because chicks want to rock man they do and, and they're the ones that are kind
of stepping into the role of where the males used to be in the 70s and 80s and
early 90s so it's kind of interesting. It's pretty
funny that the chicks are going no I don't want the whimpy crap man,I want to,
I want to, I want to like, I wanna rock and the guys
are going (sings)
you know all this you know very light R&B kind of stuff so that's really
fascinating to me. The other thing too is you know you got
the Taylor Momsens and you know some of these other really heavy, heavy you know
Tatiana singers that are out there doing growl, you're like whoa (sounds). You know
you're like (sounds) you know is she possessed but it's kind of funny because you
know the girls are actually tougher than the guys in a lot of ways and
I'm not saying there aren't a lot of guys doing some scream,
scream and growl also but not necessarily singing it's interesting because there's
not a lot of guys out there that I'm seeing, wanting to spend this kind of
time and this kind of discipline to
understand how to sing great like this so.
Anyway gang I'm doing most of this by request so if you guys have a singer
that you want me to do a takedown of, please put it in the description and
definitely check out my next video.