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.

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.

Emily Armstrong sings most of the lead vocals on the original version of The Emptiness Machine, which went on to become an incredibly successful song with 200 million views on YouTube in the last year. Since then, both Lolli Wren and MAPHRA have both recorded very well-received covers of it. Could you give us some insight into the vocal techniques that these three vocalists used in their respective performances of the song? I think it's good to be able to identify what techniques are being used so that when we hear a sound we like, we have some idea of how it's being created. It's a skill I'm trying to get better at. I'll give some brief ideas as to what singing techniques I think make their three versions of the song all sound so different from one another (in addition to all three of them having their own unique set of vocal cords and resonance chambers). Here's the link to Emily Armstrong's band Linkin Park and their video of The Emptiness Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRXH9AbT280 Emily starts singing at the 1:08 mark in the Linkin park original version. It's mostly rasp or light grit from 1:08 until 1:38, when Emily's distortion becomes much more intense. I don't have a good understanding of rasp (very light grit) techniques so I'm not going to speculate on what technique Emily may be using in the first 30 seconds of the song that have vocals performed by her. At 1:38 and onwards, I'd say she uses sort of shouty, very loose distortion that I'd call "fall-apart" distortion with a shouty approach. Im guessing you would say her grit technique is quite far towards the decompressed end of the grit spectrum. She seems to have sort of a punk, unrefined vibe she's going for and I think she achieves it convincingly. Lolli Wren covered The Emptiness Machine about three months ago and created a very professional video to accompany her performance. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYV5VODBeRY

I was reading in a post about mixed voice where you wrote: "I describe cry mode often here, or rather a top-down whimper and sob often resulting in more /ah/-ish overtones. Besides that top-down whimper that thins the vocal folds and amplifies head resonance, Sob is a sight dampening of the larynx you might feel as a slight/gentle pull in the front of the throat above the larynx when you make a whiny voice. (not dopey, but whiny). This gives you more surface area in the folds without over-flexing the TA "chest voice muscles" responsible for thickening the vocal folds." I'm not quite sure what you mean by sob. I can lower my larynx, but I'm not familiar with "dampening" the larynx. Is it the same thing as lowering the larynx? Maybe if you could make a short video where you demonstrate cry without sob and then add sob to it, I could get a better idea of sob is different from cry and what sob is supposed to sound like. Or, if it's possible to demonstrate sob just by itself, without cry, that would be helpful too. I used to think sob and cry were two words for the same thing but now I'm realizing they're two separate things.

I've learned a lot here about the three main ingredients of grit: Compression Constriction and Acoustics. I just want to make sure that I'm not mistaking exactly what a hyoid pull is. I've seen you describe it as being like a gain knob on an amp or distortion dedal for a guitar. The idea of a gain know being that as you turn it up, you get more distortion. So many vocal coaches using different terminology has probably been the biggest soure of confusion I've had over various singing-related concepts and I think that holds true for the hyoid pull as well. I just want to be certian that a hyoid pull is what I think it is. For instance, some coaches describe how to create grit as singing while holding back air at the same time. The idea of holding air back while you sing is what I was taught compression is. The reason for my uncertianty about if I really understand what a hyoid pull is, is that the more air I hold back the more the amount of grit increases - like a gain knob. In essence, before becoming acquainted with your terminiology, i pretty much thought of my gain knob for singing with grit being how much air I hold back. The word I was taught for how much air I hold back is "compression." I think in Estill, I think the term they use for that is "restriction." The more I restrict my air, the distortion I get. So it really is like a gain knob to me. If I want more disotortion, I hold back more air or "restrict" more air the more gain or distortion I get. This makes me wonder if maybe this is the hyoid pull! Before arriving at the conclusion that maybe a hyoid pull is the same as air restriction, I thougt a hyoid pull was literally pulling some part of my anatomy around the base of my throat. The problem I had with that is that when I did it, it created sort of a choking feeling and it sounded kind of like I was slightly choking. My singing felt considerablty less "free" when I did this than when I sang clean. So, is a hyoid pull simply a way of describing holding back air while you sing or "restriction" of air?