@Ajay S Welcome! Tell us a little more about the genres you're into, your goals, and your struggles.

@Lisa-Marie Lewis Welcome! Tell us a little more about yourself as a singer.

I know this isn't definitive answer or grit types line by line that you're looking for, but I want to give you a more complete understanding rather than trying to strictly define what you're hearing with a particular name. It's all a spectrum. The names I gave them in my course were simply to define the sound and physical feel for commonly heard grit used along that compression and pitch spectrum. Compressed vs uncompressed is a much better way to think of distortion, with how much compression (or lack thereof) possible relying heavily on the pitch under it. When analyzing what's being done, the first thing to look for is the pitches being used in relation to the bridges. The typical vocal bridges (highest pitch until a break or choking) are around these pitches: 1. Men — E4, A4, C#5-E5 2. Women — A4, C#5-E5 Lower pitched grit tends to be more compressed to make up for the looser vocal cords and lower chest-voice formant (formant = resonance and pressure in the vocal tract). Higher pitched grit tends to be more uncompressed to make up for the tighter/stretched vocal cords and higher, lifted and back, head-voice formant. However, you have some leeway with this spectrum, just like the first bridge isn't a hard stop for clean singing chest vs head (you can pull chest-voice higher with thicker TA muscles and pull head-voice lower without engaging the TA muscles), you can also compress grit above the first bridge and uncompress grit below the first bridge. That's where things get much more complicated to answer... UNCOMPRESSED LOWS Being more uncompressed the lower you go below the first bridge introduces a lot of air and chaos that can be difficult to control without sounding weird. Tom Waits is a famous example of someone who does uncompressed grit below his first bridge. COMPRESSED MIDS Getting very harsh sounding grit just above the first bridge requires lighter throttle so that it doesn't grind. Hetfield hurt his voice by staying loud and compressed up high, including moving towards his second bridge where it wants to uncompress naturally. Doing that is too taxing on the voice.

@Kenny Kendall "Decompressed" or "uncompressed" in context of distortion is really just saying that you're allowing air to bleed through the glottis, not having enough force applied to closure to stop extra air from passing through. This is in contrast to "compressed" where the amount of force applied to closure requires the air be pushed through the glottis. "Grinding" is simply describing soft tissue grinding together. This is almost always caused by pushing too much throttle rather than balancing compression and air support. More compressed distortion often requires you back off in throttle in order to not grind any tissue together harshly. Keeping thing lighter and looser allows vibration rather than the wear and tear of doing so louder and more stiff. While what the examples you gave are correct, I would add that it's primarily the amount of air pressure or throttle that causes grinding issues. You can be VERY compressed and not grind as long as the throttle is light enough. Granted, that doesn't mean it will sound good. Haha! One last thing I want to address is where you said "Compression causes air to 'spray out intensely like if you held your thumb over a garden hose.'" This analogy applies specifically to twang compression because of the narrowing of the vocal tract (hose) by the epiglottis (thumb). To compress the glottis directly means closing off or stopping the flow and putting all of that pressure directly on what is stopping the flow. This causes a sputter, not increased flow. In distortion, that sputter is balanced and controlled to create vocal fry, and the narrowing happens by dampening the larynx which engages the false cords more. This distinction is one of the main reasons I like to separate compression and constriction when talking about distortion—keeping compression as talking about the glottis, and keeping constriction (albeit a type of compression) as talking about the narrowing and shaping of the arytenoids, lowering the larynx, and narrowing the false fold area of the vocal tract. Compression can be primarily felt on top of the throat and towards the back; and further assisted by over-crying, which thins the glottis, relaxes the larynx, opens the vocal tract, and adds /uh/ and /aw/ overtones to the voice. Constriction can be primarily felt at the front of the throat around the hyoid, and is more focused on narrowing or vocal tract lengthening than actual closure.

@Phillip Vautour The Origin is a great, general, and forgiving mic. The main problem with mics is that it's not one size fits all. Before spending a lot on a mic, it can really help to book a couple of hours at a studio with a lot of mics (they'll record multiple at the same time) and get their opnion on what sounds best for your voice. If you sound great on a $4k to $10k mic, I guaranteee that you'll be able to find a mic in that same family of sound color for much cheaper - sometimes even an exact clone.

@Martin Sinclair , @Shajeen Islam : I likely said this in the episode, but it's been a year and a half since then... Recording you voice is definitely putting you under a microscope. Hardly anyone's voice sounds good to us raw. We're used to room spatial acoustics/reflections and psychoacoustics like masking (our brain ignoring certain sounds) and localization (where we perceive the sound coming from). You don't get that with a close mic's diaphragm. Instead, you get it very raw. Combine that with being used to hearing your own voice inside your head, adding a whole different level of harmonics and noise compression that no one else hears and is directly tied with your self-identity, and suddenly this disembodied voice you're hearing in the recording sounds nothing like what you just heard yourself sing. This is why a lot of people remove one ear of their headphones when recording, to "bring the room back" for a more natural, non-distracting sound. It's also why mixing your voice with something as simple as a compressor and a little reverb makes it suddenly sound far more pleasing and natural to us.

Only 30% of the article is free to read, taking it all the way up to a couple of paragraphs about diffusion. I know some ways to confuse diffusion models, but I honestly find it fascinating how similar we think to these two models. I've seen videos about AGI asking the question of how we define consciousness, and at what point can we distinguish between consciousness and the way we learn and piece together information as human consciousness. I was surprised by the number of apparent crossovers between how AI and humans think. I guess that makes sense, since we think within our own paradigm and have aspired to build neural networks out of machines. In any case, I'm sure that takes this conversation WAY off track given your summary of the article.