music · personal-life
Learning to Scream: A Beginner’s Exploration of False Cords & High Compression
Edit: follow my video journey here to see how I’ve been working through learning false cord screaming: https://zerotoakerfeldt.substack.com/
Recently I’ve been working on finding out how my favorite artists are managing vocal distortion. Below is a series of recordings that I ended up recording for a friend of mine to explain some interesting things I found while researching distortion techniques online.
First up, false cord activation & ‘throat singing’ sensations:
Afterwards I’m able to play around with similar sensations to achieve a very airy ‘sigh-scream’:
After that I looked at the higher placement screams from Mark in a Kardavox tutorial and tried to achieve a compression-style distortion that requires restriction of air (opposite of what I was doing last demo, which used a ton of unrestricted air flow):
These sounded quite dry and airy instead of the ‘wet’ sound some people are looking for, but I was still able to shape it to get some cool noises:
On the last one you can actually hear part of the same false cord ‘throat singing’ vibration that the first audio sample had. There’s a careful balance in between diaphragmatic support, compression, and positioning in the throat that happens to achieve that, although I don’t have much control over it at the moment.
Stay tuned for more progress!