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 and next up is Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden.
Before we get started if you wouldn't mind, please like and subscribe to my
channel that would be awesome. Don't forget to ring that Bell so I can
keep new cool videos coming your way and I also have a singing course it's called
How to Sing Better Than Anyone Else where we negotiate all these different
styles of music and I don't just present it and show it with my own voice but I
show it with my voice and my students voices on how many different types of
people, different voice types etc, can get to these crazy amazing places for
singing. So Bruce is certainly no exception to that. Now I've done a couple
vocal demonstrations myself. I did "Run To The Hills" and my student Gabriela Guncikova
did "Trooper". So I'm gonna walk through a few of these but I want to
explain some key elements of what it is that Bruce uses and the kind of
compression that he uses to start with and also the kind of head voice, mixed
voice sound that he uses, in order to get the range that he has, the clarity, the
power, the tone, the pitch and all that.So what that's said I'm going to start with
myself and we're gonna go ahead right here.
"Run To The Hills".
Okay right there. So there's an illusion that all of a sudden you know
I'm singing really heavy and really loud but (sings)
right. I'm not singing that hard or that loud and I want
you to go back to the original of Bruce Dickinson and listen closely to the way
he sings. It sounds like he's just pounding it and killing it, he's actually
not. He's compressing his air and he's controlling his air with the amount of
distortion that he wants in his voice in order to maintain being able to sing
that. The other thing is, is that when he goes up top and he starts to go into
connecting the the chest voice you know the belting call register we've
talked about a lot, going through the passaggio (sings)
seamlessly as he goes in and out the passaggio break, you don't hear his break
but he brings his head voice down pretty low so that as he goes up into his head
voice, he's able to lean into that sound a little bit more and give him all this
range that we talk about in my singing course. So let's continue as I start to
escalate up the scale, you can hear me as I start to kind of let go and
shed that weight of over singing in the bottom and I start to release into
head voice, check it out.
Okay now so you know (sings). You know I'm not going (sings). I'm not screaming at you right,
I'm actually deceiving you
a little bit and I'm making you think that I'm singing louder and heavier than
I am. Now this next section couldn't be more, be a better example of what I'm
talking about, check this out.
See so (sings) right and he's got a very dramatic approach. So it's (sings)
right. So he's actually really kind of bringing his head voice down into the
chest voice pretty low. So it's not like you know like maybe oh I'm gonna say
like a Freddie Mercury who would bring his chest voice up high, who actually
belted more in the upper mid register of his call register, his belting register
voice and or let's say a Dio or David Coverdale or or anybody of a number of
these rock guys from back in the day, he's bringing his head voice down pretty
low and that's really apparent when you hear it on the chorus, check this out.
Now if you listen really close (sings) right. Right in there is that register break
transition. So I have a choice I can bring the chest voice up with a
percentage of mixed into that one note right there or I could you know or pull
chest up all completely into that sound or I can mix and bring head voice down
into that sound as well. So I have this kind of three, four, five notes to play
with around this range where I don't have to muscle the chest voice and
literally heave up my vowels up top or you know blood-curdling scream at you or
just trying to drag all that weight, though I do do that sometimes for effect.
Often times, now I even did that in "Pain Killer" by Judas Priest because that's
another example, Rob Halford is another great example and I'm gonna do a series
of these and he's going to be one of the guys where there's a lot of head voice
involved where Rob mostly takes his head voice and brings it really low down into
his chest voice, very similar to this. Now Bruce is more of a master at connecting
the sound and not letting you know when he actually makes that (sings) makes that
connection through chest and head but you can't really hear me do it either
and I'm really emulating or imitating his style to give you guys a taste of
what it is that he's doing. One more thing notice again and I'm going to say
this over and over again I really want to emphasize this is I am not killing
myself and pushing too hard through the passaggio so you don't hear my register
break because as I cover in my singing course, I show you how to seamlessly
connect those notes so it's one long powerful note like I just showed you a
second (sings)
through that passaggio without hearing the break. Okay listen up.
I'll let it play a little more.
Even the (sings) right. I'm in head voice, I'm not in chest voice.
I'm in head voice it sounds like in chest because I built the power of my
head voice up so much down in my lower register that it makes you think that
I'm pulling my chest voice up. I can do that, I do it all the time but in the
style and in the spirit of Bruce, I don't. I stay within what Bruce does and then I
continue on into the chorus, check it out.
That's chest.
Okay now I could I could continue on and I.. you know I'm gonna go ahead and I'll
post the links of these, the full versions of these songs and the tutorial
parts that I talk about, I'll put those in the description so you guys can check
those out but I want to go ahead now and do Gabriela Guncikova my
student. Now Gabriela is a girl so you say well Ken it's not fair you know
she's a girl and girls can sing higher. You know that's true to some extent but
let me just tell you something about the female range. Now in her case, she
singing Alto register and a lot of girls that sing the alto register, sing a lot
like a guy like Bruce Dickinson and they can have a lot of power in it where
there you know she sings you know like a Bobby Kimball song from Toto, you know
she can kill it or she sings "Jane" by Jefferson Starship you know Mickey
Thomas some of these other singers. It man the one hand seem easier but on the
other hand it's actually not because girls have a much more difficult time managing
their belting register because they want to default into their head voice just
like I showed you I did for Bruce. The difference is is their head voices, cause
for the most part are nowhere near as powerful as a guy's head voice when it's
developed because it guys um vocal folds, their chords are a lot larger, they're
60% larger for the most part and so they have a really tough time cause their
head voice or their falsetto or reinforced falsetto is really hootie and
flutie. So they can't get that same kind of power. So she has to rely either on
growing that head voice to sound like Bruce and bringing it down in head or
she has to pull up that chest voice from a female register and then hand it off
later to the head voice which is what we chose to do and then one more thing, it's
a lot more difficult, because of that it's a lot more difficult for girls to
get good distortion and distortion in the head voice register. That's why you
hear so few girls doing that especially in this genre. You can say oh it's easier
for them. It's really not, it's harder for them to get the distortion, that harmonic
resonance of distortion and be legitimate and
then even more so when they get into their head voice but listen now I said, I
want to, I want to show you that it's not I just teach myself how to do this and
show you how awesome Ken Tamplin is, it's not about that. It's about the technique
and I want you to see how effective that is with someone else in, this case a
different gender being female, doing the same thing. Check it, out here it is.
"The Trooper".
Okay now, if you noticed the transitional notes for Gabriela, you're gonna go oh
man transitional, what is all this stuff I don't understand Ken. Well I
cover all of this in my singing course guys but I'm just giving you information.
So her transitional notes, she didn't go into head voice until she did the high
harmony (sings) you know the higher notes right. Now her her register breaks so she's
pulling chest and waiting longer to get into her head voice before she starts to
make that transition in and out. She does do it, she just waits longer on it. So
here we go and a lot of and a.. whoops, and a lot of times too I'll do, when I do a
female versions or renditions of these songs, I'll usually do them in higher
keys for the girls because it's easier for them to do, to make these transitions,
that's more consistent with the transitions that guys would do in a male
register or within the male range okay, here we go.
Now if you also notice too what I mention about not over singing the
bottom and compressing the air, if you want to go back and listen to these
verses again, listen to how round the vowels are. They're big and bold and
round. They don't sound pinched and squeezed and the reason is again because
when we have the confidence to know that we're not thinking about this as the
high note, this is the high note and the body shuts down. This has to do with the
psychology of singing, we're able to develop and build muscle memory for big
robust, round vocal sounds like this in order to be able to have the, the
voice just sound effortless like this big, huge, roaring lion with the
distortion, so we get the distortion, we get all the tone we want but we don't do
it by pinching and squeezing, we do it by training open throat vowels first and
then leaning into the sound to get the distortion that we're looking for. Pay
close attention when you hear these kinds of things come across.
Alright like I said I'll have you guys listen to the full versions of this.
I'll put this in the description but this is how to sing like Bruce Dickinson
from Iron Maiden and like I said we're gonna continue our series on this.
If you like what you heard please again like and subscribe to my channel. I'm
doing a lot of these by requests too by the way so please also put in the
description who you'd like me to do a takedown of How To Sing Like so and so,
your favorite singer. I'm happy to do that and definitely check out my next
video.