I'm curious about that foam shield you have around your microphone in the background of your videos, @Draven Grey. What would you say that does for you? Do you have any recommendations on which to buy? I've thought about getting one a lot before and even tried making one myself at one point.

I want to remind everyone that Music Mondays is a great time to share your own stuff or stuff you find really cool. Just sharing and entertainment without having to share lessons learned, analysis, or the like. ***𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰, 𝗼𝗿 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲*** I'm not one to share music just for the sake of filling up Music Mondays, so I haven't posted a lot on Music Monday for a while. This is mostly because what I'm personally working on is still in production—from my own music, to a new big project that's still forming, and a few people that I'm either producing or writing with. To be honest, I'm in the middle of an unexpected divorce that took over my time for while, so I haven't posted nearly as much as I've wanted to in general. While I'll still be busy for a couple of months, I'm finally able to start planning more time creating and being more active here.

I tried what you had mentioned before, @Draven Grey, in just recording every other line during a vocal take. The difference is night and day. It's so much easier to get good takes! Thanks for the tip.

It seems to me that it would be helpful everyone in this community to learn to distinguish between compressed and. decompressed grit and how different acoustic placements sound when different singers use them. Lots of people do fry screams, but many of them end up sounding very different. A singer that has recently gained quite a lot of attention among the "first time reactors" is an artist named MAPHRA singing a cover of a song by BTH titled "Doomed.": Between 1:11 and 1:32 into this video of MAPHRA gets a unique sounding grit. I've seen various vocal coaches claim they were giing to analyze her technique. Some came up with things that sounded somewhat close but didn't really sound right. Others, even one coach who claims to specialize in distortion attempted no analysis of her grit technique. I would guess that MAPHRA is using fry scream for her unique type of grit but I would love to know. Where does her technique for grit fall on the compressed to decompressed spectrum? Is there a lot of constriction (hard hypid pull) or only a ight amount of constriction (light hyoid pull)? Where is her acoustic placement? I think the better we get at being able to identify what techniques singers are using and how those techniques vary in sound. depending on which vocalists are using them, the better we'll get at deciding how to create the sound that we're going for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6L-GUOAhGo

Over the past month or more I've been working on a study of sorts trying to get down the vocals for Crawl Away by Tool. It seemed like a good piece because there are long, drawn-out notes with heavier grit. I think I've gotten it to a place I'm satisfied with, although I probably am actually using more distortion than he does in the song. But I figured, hey, it is the skill I'm trying to learn so I may as well step it up a notch. This recording is after countless takes to get the very best ones, granted I was learning the more aggressive stuff more or less from scratch over that time. This is the vocals only, so I uploaded it to SoundCloud so you can see the waveform and skip over the silent parts. It was recorded through a compressor but otherwise it's completely dry. https://soundcloud.com/to_the_sun/crawl-away-a-cappella