I Was Obsessed With Grit · Rock Singing Success

I Was Obsessed With Grit

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.

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