Very cool vocal performance by Sia in this song: https://youtu.be/t2NgsJrrAyM?si=jgioXLPW0FiGAl0C&t=242 Wondering if anyone has ideas about how she achieves those interesting vocal "chirps" when she sings "I'm alive..." around 4:00 into the song.

I like to sing melodically with grit, so I've never actively tried to learn false fold screams. Then I came across a guy who said that the more you work on your false fold screams, the false folds adapt in a way so that they can vibrate faster than the false folds of the typical non-vocalist!!! That's amazing. No wonder these guys who have been doing them for years and years get so much more distortion. It's not as if the flase fold scream is some ultra-technical technique. It's about as basic as they come and maybe that's why screaming is more in vogue than singing with grit: It's harder to sing with grit and manage both the clean note and the grit you place over the top than to just create distortion. I thought: If I learn to do false fold screams, my false folds could adapt in a way that they vibrate faster, which could give me better quality, more badass grit when I sing with grit. So, maybe there is some benefit in learning to scream even though I'm not a screamer. I have looked at numerous tutorials for false fold screams including Gabriel Bonhila's channel (he does a tremendous Alex Terrible type scream) and David Benites Extreme Vocal. Not one of them uses a hyoid pull. They don't even use a similar sounding term. It's amazing how much distortion they can generate without using any constriction. They create far more distortion than I 'd ever even need to! Not only do they not ever mention a hypoid pull, they don't even say to use constriction! I thought: "How can they be creating so much distortion without one of the three essential in gredients? My curiosity was piqued. I'm wondering if maybe hyoid pulls are only necessary for singing with grit but not for screaming. One said specifically: "Do not squeeze or narrow your vocal tract." I tried letting the tract remain open and I got a much better false fold scream than I did when I was trying to make my vocal tract narrower to get that "thumb over the water hose" on my airflow! I couldn't belive I'd never thought to try that.

For a long time the main thing on my mind when going into a practice session would be how to get better at creating grit or distortion. I was a distortion freak! I find it as fascinating as ever to be able to sing with grit and I've even gotten a little bit interested in screaming, but mostly it was about singing melodically with grit or even pitched screaming, which essentially is the most extreme end of the spectrum that goes from singing with light rasp all the way to using pitched screams. Recently I hit a plateau. It didn't seem like any more progress was possible unless I made some type of fundamental change. It occurred to me that the quality of your gritty singing is going to be dependent on the quality of the signal from the source - the true folds. I'm no expert in acoustics but it makes sense to me that if we're using the false folds and other supraglottal structures to saturate the clean signal with distortion, then the more robust the clean signal is, the better you're going to be able to saturate it with distortion. In essence, good quality clean vocals lead to good quality gritty vocals and low quality clean vocals lead to low quality gritty vocals.

A SUBMITTED QUESTION ***** I've been doing what you told me and realized something when switching between resonances. Whenever I go high/into head voice and I want to go back down to chest voice my larynx gets stuck, it's a really odd feeling. I was trying to go back down from head voice while using the straw when I felt everything jam up into place with air nowhere to go - it created a really pressurized chamber inside of my mouth combined with the puffy cheeks. I have been trying to cry but I suspect I've been doing it wrong. I feel tension in my throat when I'm crying so I guess that's not correct. Also, I'm still not able to utilize forward placement. The most I've been able to feel is vibrations in my nose. The straw warmup did clear my chest voice out but it's not helping me even while doing the sirens because of the larynx thing. ***** Great question! This is something a LOT of people struggle with at first, both with the straw AND the missed fundamentals of the singing voice that can smooth out the transition of chest and head voice as well as ghelp you with more effortless singing in geneal. STRAW VS NORMAL SINGING For the straw sirens, don't worry too much about your voice flipping. It's mostly about a stretch from as low as you can sing to as high as you can sing while staying SUPER LIGHT (light and sqeuaky on the top end). As you learn more about and implement better cry vocal mode, it will smooth out, but that's not the main point of the sirens. Most vocal flips, or getting stuck trying to "switch resonances," happen because the chest voice wasn't places well to begin with—where even chest voice is mixed, which I'll describe more below. Singing into the straw is where you want more emphasis on cry and twang. It actually takes a bit more effort than normal singing, meaning you have to give it both more twang and cry than normally required. Cry is the foundation. When normal singing, it's all about lift and sob; or rather top-down whimper ("Michael Jackson" voice or feminization of the voice) putting resonance up and out, behind the nose and eyes, and ALSO sob relaxing the larynx. Both of these together relax the larynx and give you a mix of head-voice and chest-voice resonance throughout your range—more chesty down low and more heady up high, like a giant cross-fade. Twang, edging acoustics, or pointing the voice behind the nose or eyes adjusts your sound color. Front to back is edging to curbing (bright to round). Up and down in that spot is the top-down whimper of cry.

Nik said: "If you scroll through Instagram, TikTok, they're just bedroom kids screaming. Somehow everyone knows how to do false cords and the zombie noises." Oli interjected: "Yeah, yeah, and everyone's got this kind of like, like it's funny like the technique of screaming. Not that there's no technique to screaming, but like, that wasn't something I would think about before, you know, I would just like, yeah. Just want to scream. Like it was just screaming. I never thought about like I might damage my voice or anything like that. And sometimes I'll see someone going 'you want to scream like Oli Sykes? This is how I do it" and I watch it and I'm like "is it'? Cause I don't know that. Like that's, I have no idea how I do that. I never think about it. Do you know what I mean"? I know what he means; I speak English quite well, but I can't say I understand his mentality. Just as if I were going to be a public speaker or an orator, I'd want to learn how to speak without jamming "like" into every sentence. I'd want to try to eliminate saying "um." I know why people do it. They're using that time to think about what they are going to suppose for example, if I were asked: "How do you sing"? Hopefully I wouldn't start like this: "Uh, well, it's like, I mean, when I sing, like I have to relax...." Hopefully, I'd start more like this: "You want to know how I sing? I'll tell you exactly how I sing [that bought me a whole lot more time to think about what I'm going to say than the former example]. The first thing about it is I need to relax. Why would I relax? [I know why I'd relax but by asking that rhetorical question, I've given myself more time to decide how to explain it.] I relax so it will sound good and so I don't get hurt. That means I'm doing some stretches. before I start. I want all the muscles in my neck to be ready for it. I don't want them tight. I want them to be supple and flexible so I don't get hurt and so singing will be a little closer to effortless because ideally, singing should be almost effortless.