Hey guys welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy where the proof is in the singing. Next
up is Layne Staley "Man In A Box" and you know what I've been excited to do this one because,
I haven't heard this yet but I'm, I know that it's an original track, an isolated vocal stem
which is really cool. We're gonna do an analysis and a tutorial. We're gonna talk a lot about it.
We'll talk about the recording process and everything along the way but I've been excited
to do this one because it's just an epic, epic piece so. With that said I have a singing course,
the course is called How to Sing Better Than Anyone Else, you can find it right
here at Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy.com. I also have a singing forum for you guys interested in singing,
please stop by, we've got over 20,000 members in there right now it's just going like
gangbusters. You can sign up for free at Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy.com
and we negotiate and discuss all these cool styles and all these different ways of getting
distortion and range and power and longevity and all the you know all this stuff, endurance.
So with that said I just want to dive right in and see what we got. So let's fire it up, here we go.
Okay right away before we get into anything, you can hear a multi-track going on so it's like a
couple three vocals right. I don't know this yet because I haven't heard this and it's really
neat to get the intimate isolated stem, vocal stem of this so that I can hear how it
was recorded, what kind of mic it was recorded on, you know was it high fidelity, was it low fidelity.
Some people actually choose low fidelity I mean you've got Bono from U2, he likes to sing through
an SM57 sometimes, you've got Michael Jackson used, used an SM7 with Bruce Swedien, the engineer
on that, that wasn't necessarily a high fidelity mic you know a lot of people use that microphone.
You've got gosh who else has used low fed.., oh Prince. Prince was the king of using lo-fi
stuff but it was kind of his thing and and the reason I'm bringing that up is,
is the mic itself doesn't sound that high fidelity and so why I say that is you get kind of a
a grungy almost like singing through an amp kind of sound with certain effects in certain mics
so listen closely for that, that's kind of what I hear and then he's real grindy and grungy (sings)
you know (sings) in the sound too so check it out, here we go.
He uses a lot of ah. Ah.
Now very little reverb. There's a room reverb that's kind of
thick and tubby in the sound, you can hear it, it's not clear and it's not like a
real expensive sounding reverb and then a really short 250 millisecond slap delays (sounds).
For you engineers out there, you guys with guitar pedals and stuff you know what I'm talking about,
it's not a big yeah a, big, long room hall kind of sound so because of that, you're going to get
a little bit more of an upfront vocal right and it's not going to sound real washy and
real sloshy in a mix. IIt's just going to be real tight in the sound and let's continue.
Okay now. I wanna you to go through this so he's going (sings) he's covering his sound so he's (sings)
right. Now we talked a lot about the grunge era and covering or
darkening a sound. That's exactly what he's doing so do it with me (sings) think of rolling your r's
er, everything's kind of like singing like this with marbles in your mouth. We call it marble
mouth and who really I think, I've said this a lot of times but Tom Petty really kind of
did this early on you know (sings) you hear that kind of er. So listen closely go (sings)
right and this became kind of the the quintessential example or the, the signature
sound of modern rock singers, especially male market modern rock singers. So listen closely again.
Okay. Now he's starting to wind up a little bit at the beginning, he sounds kind of tame,
he doesn't sound like he's trying to like you know wow us with you
know the Layne Staley growls and his distortion and stuff so (sings) right.
He's starting to let us know something's coming right.
Okay.
See (sings) right everything's kind of like that right so and you hear the delay (sounds)
very short delay, it's not a lot of delay.
Lot of vibrato (sings). Vibrato.
Ok let's do this together so let's go hold on
Now before we do this, I want to make one more notation here, annotation. His headphones have
got to be really stinking loud because in lower fi microphones, usually you don't hear a lot of the
bleed from the headphones because they're really directional and they don't pick up a lot of room
sound right and I'm not saying, I don't know exactly what mic he did use but I could tell
it's not like an M149 or something or U87 or you know whatever telefunken or you know C12A or
whatever but, but you can hear the bleed from his headphones so he must be listening to this
really loud. So before we get into the chorus we talk about it, I want to point this out. Listen.
You can kind of hear all that noise going on right so alright let's get into the course here.
You hear that (sounds) in the sound.(sings) right.
So he's really stepping into the sound right away and you can hear a lot of compression, it's
really covered in the compression so what it does it's hitting the compressor so hard that
it's kind of darkening it and making it kind of thick sounding right listen closely but I love
the way he distorts his voice, I just showed you how to do it. Now the way I'm distorting it and
the way he distorts it are a little differently. I'm using open throat technique that I teach
in my singing course. So I teach this kind of distortion in my course but you really want to
mature into this kind of sound, you don't want to go straight into this kind of sound because
you could really hurt yourself over time and cause a node, a vocal loss, you know dysphonia.
So we really want to be careful on how you do it but let's listen to it one more time.
So he's not going to feed he's sing fade. Now in my course I talk all about this, where we have
vowel substitutions so that they're easier on the throat so he says
fade my eyes instead of feed my eyes, he goes (sings)
right fade, fade right and that's how he's able to get
safely through some of this stuff or safely is a relative term but.
Hear that.
So (sings) right he's (sounds), everything's (sounds). It's not (sings),
he's not really heavy on the e it's more like the number eight
and that's how he's able to safely get through that as well.
See he doesn't go he, he goes hey, hey who tries (sings)
right so it's my (sounds) in the sound. Now we're a lot safer, I've talked about this
a lot, to start out with a clean (sings) right. Start out with a clean sound
first and then (sings) and then you can gently start to lean into that sound and compress that sound,
to get the desired distorted effect but to just go straight to a distorted effect will
predominantly forever sentence you to have to distorting a sound when you go up into a
register like this when you want a belt, it becomes very problematic to get back to a clean sound. Now
many singers fall prey to this, where they only know this sound so the only way they can get
this note out is by screaming rather than by finessing first and then gently carefully
leaning into this distortion. I cover all of this in my singing course alright, let's continue.
Now (sings) right there he kind of gets caught a little bit and you hear him get a little pitchy on the sound.
Now you'd never notice this in a mixed because it's just so epic and, and some people might
even try to get a little pitchy on it, to match the original recording of it but I don't
think in the studio he's thinking that, he's probably trying to nail it as best as he could
and we have, you know no one's perfect right so listen closely. It's a little pitchy going in.
(sings) right. He's a little sketchy there you know. Check..keep going.
Now one more thing. We've talked about this too, when you cover a sound or darken a sound like
that with that marble mouthy kind of sound, it's kind of hard to get to really good pitch because,
the pitch kind of slides around all over the place because it's covered and darkened or colored
dark, to find absolute pitch in the sound in the throat and the resonance in front of the face,
becomes harder so if you're going from a bright sound with your a (sings)
from that kind of sound, to (sings), to covering, covering the sound, makes it sound more flat. So you
have to compensate with that sound and bring it up into pitch, compared to when you're bright on the
sound and real open in the face with a smile okay. Mask and a smile. Alright let's continue, here we go.
Now, some people when they're in the studio, record something like this
and they leave it all in the field and it's got crazy energy and you know and, and, and, and then you
see him live and you're like kind of disappointed because they didn't hit all the notes and they
didn't you know sing the chorus note as long or they didn't have the same energy or you know
whatever to maybe half the song was good, the other half the song wasn't so good. I've seen these guys
a couple times and both times I saw him, he was more energetic live, screams were gnarlier live
may not have been the same as the record but it was kind of like when I seen Motorhead,
walked away going whoa that was like intense, in 11ths, not even intense
I mean so he, this brother leaves it all in the field and I know there was drugs involved and I
know there's depression like I said a lot of things going on which gave him a lot of angst to just like (sounds)
you know do his thing but this guy did the opposite, the records were intense but
the live performances were even more intense so.
Now one more thing, by the way, he's an exception to the rule, him and Chris Cornell are kind of
two exceptions to the rule. I'd say Scott Weiland a little bit but not as much were in this era.
Most of the guys, the Cobains and stuff, never sang any vibrato at all and he brings in some vibrato,
he brings in some swag (sings) right. So Cornell did that too. Now Cornell
chose to sing straight because he could sing with vibrato too, Cornell was just a phenomenal singer
and so you can really hear that he's just, not worried about being the grunge
guy or in the grunge era and some people don't consider him grunge and I know that
him and Cornell and other other singers wanted not to be associated with the
the term grunge, they just wanted to be you know rock bands from Seattle. So I respect that and you can
kind of hear that he's not trying to to match that you know, Nirvana-ishi kind of sound and
Weiland to a certain degree did that as well but I just want to make that notation along the way.
Now, you hear a lot of the double tracking thing we've talked a lot about, you can hear that here
you know it's not just one single vocal line you can hear all of the little nuance
so he might, so as much as we'd like to think that this was spontaneous in the way he's
sang it, it, if it was then what he did was he sang the whole first, you know the whole song
spontaneously and then he came back and tried to remember what he did to double track these parts
to thicken it up with these you know, these again, these double tracked parts so, so it's
not quite as spontaneous as we'd like to think because there's so much production value but
the production value is so subtle, it's not like hey look at me I'm going to show you production,
it's like let's not have anybody really know that we're adding all this production to make it bigger,
because we want to maintain being core and having a core sound and, and being genuous, rather than
disingenuous with too much production in the song so, wanted to add that to to this.
Now in this chor or this pre-chorus right here you can hear, it sounds different than
the last time, he's holding the notes longer, than he did the first time so he, it wasn't a
cut and paste, I didn't cut and paste that verse into this verse and blah blah blah,
he's actually singing through this stuff so that's cool.
Even that line too right.
See (sings),
that's different, that's different, you can hear it's different than
the first time he sang it which is awesome.
See even on that one so (sings) right, he's holding the notes longer than
the first time he did it and it's a little more intense, there's a little more energy in the sound.
So you can really hear as he's going through, and by the way I want to point something out so.
Here I am, this is like the fourth one of these vocal stem things I've done today and I've
done a lot of singing, I've got more singing to do. I'll knock out I don't know six, seven, eight
of these things probably today. If you notice my voice is crystal clear. I want to make a very
important point to this. I'm, you know singing Layne Staley back in the day in his prime this and that,
I'm 56, I'll be 57 this year, it's because of my vocal technique, I'm able to do this
hours on end and not miss a beat, really and do these vocal demonstrational stuff and be
crystal clear. You hear me talking, you don't hear me sounding all (sounds), because I know how to do this
safely. This is exactly what I cover in my course because not only can I do it safely, I can do this
for hours on, on end, get all the distortion I want, the range I want, the endurance, longevity and I
can do this day in and day out and have for some 35, 40 years or whatever since my 20s right so
45 years or whatever, 45, no that wouldn't be right 35. Don't date myself too far, 35 years or whatever
it is and that's important to, to annotate because a lot of these guys lost their voices,
a lot of the 80s guys, almost none of them can sing anymore and I'm still, I'm, I've never sung better
in my life. I love my tone, I love my range, my pitch, you know I don't have to work so hard at things
because I know how to finesse my way to notes. I know how to to do this with a lot of technique
rather than just killing myself. So I just wanted to make that a point as we're going through this
and you can, just again hear the clarity of my voice and so forth so important distinction.
Cool.
I wonder, I think that's probably it, yeah and by the way listen, listen to all of the headphone and the (sounds)
actually that's a preamp that sounds like a tube
that's going to go out a little bit. You listen to the background of this.
You can hear all that, that because they gated the vocal there was so much (sounds) in the sound they had to gate
it to not have that (sounds) sound in between all the lines but anyway, I bring all this up because,
I wonder if these guys knew when they were, I mean we all hope that our albums are gonna go
gold when we make them or platinum or whatever but I wonder if these guys knew how iconic and how
epic and how much influence these tracks would have you know this many years later to this day
still inspiring and encouraging and have raised the bars so high for others to try to reach so.
So anyway gang thank you for listening and definitely check out my next video.