When I was first learning to sing, I acquired bad habit of pressing most of the time when I sing. This came about because my introduction to singing came via tutorials made by a coach who heavily implied that compression always makes a vocalist sound more interesting and that there is no such thing as over compressing. So, I started compressing and compressing hard! To be clear, when I say "compression", I'm talking about glottal compression and hypercompression, which are both about how much force you use to attain vocal cord closure. I took some lessons from a coach and found out that there absolutely is such a thing as compressing too much and I was doing it. My coach said I was "pressing" too much when I sang, even in clean singing. Pressing is really destructive because it involves literally pressing the vocal folds together hard while forcing them open by squeezing air through them. Pressing makes the vocal folds red, irritated and swollen, since you're literally squeezing air through your vocal folds while they're being tightly closed. Problem is, I don't understand the difference between using increased amounts of compression for grit and using pressing while singing. Don't compression (especially hypercompression) and pressing both involve using a lot of force to close the vocal cords while trying to force air through them? I find this the single most confusing thing about creating grit . I'm not asking about the decompresssed style of creating grit. I'm also not asking about the type of compression twang creates by narrowing the vocal tract, I'm ONLY asking about using glottal compression with enough force to create grit - the compression based style of creating grit that singers like Phil Anselmo, Rob Halford, Rob Zombie and Sully Erna use. Since creating grit requires more glottal compression than singing cleanly, how can you compress that hard (especially if using hypercompression) and somehow avoid pressing while you're doing it? It seems to me that "pressing" and "using a lot of glottal compression" are two different terms for the same thing. They both describe using a lot of force to achieve vocal fold closure, so isn't end result of either pressing while singing clean or using glottal compression with a lot of force to create grit, especially if it's hypercompressed (Phil Anselmo, Sully Erna, M. Shadows) is still going to be red, irritated, swollen vocal folds from trying to force air through tightly closed vocal cords and maybe even choking off the airflow and with it, the note you're trying to sing.

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