If you tend toward a basic "choir boy" / naive head voice like me, you need all the tone help you can get. With these tricks I find resonant spots everywhere. #1 this is easy. Turn your head to the 1 o'clock or 11 o'clock position, chin a little lifted. The formant shift especially on high notes is quite tasty. I've seen performers do this in live shows a number of times. #2 coordination building. Ever make funny sounds or impersonate characters with odd voices? I learned to mimic the voice of characters like Stitch from "Lilo & Stitch" or Meatwad from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" - I think its a narrowing of the vocal tract at the back of the tongue (?), I feel it way in the back just above the glottis. Overdoing it sounds doofy/quacky, but ~25-50% adds a nice layer of brass to most vowels, and it pairs great with cry mode to make high note access easier. Balance is key! #3 more coordination and some strength building. Soft palate position is a HUGE tone knob, as I'm sure a lot of you have discovered. Some coaches train to keep the soft palate closed all the time, which seems to help volume level for no-mic performance, but the nasal cavity is an AMAZING resonator when used carefully. Sometimes I have to really push my soft palate open (edging vowels especially), and its easy to get too nasal at lower pitches. But a lot like the cartoon-character throat narrowing trick: a little does a lot, balance is key, and it stacks great with cry mode. I also find soft palate opening to invite a bit more wind at the expense of more strength in the core and throat to keep things stable.

Since this came up again today on YouTube, I updated my answer to be sure it answered the common question in full. So it doesn't get lost in the comments of Vocal Distortion pt.2: How to Grit & Scream, where most people won't see it unless they happen upon it, I want to post it separately here. Most vocal teachers separate Fry Screams and False Cord Screams as if they are totally different things. Then they start describing all these different types of screams and it seems like all these different teachers are contradicting each other or using totally different terminology. That's confusing to people trying to learn to scream, and rightly so! There doesn't seem to be a consensus amongst those teaching screams online. I see it differently. They're all talking about the same things in the best terminology and visualization they can in order to keep things short and digestible, but you need a translator to see how they are the same concepts with different language. When I talk about screams, I think in terms of the harmonic saturation we hear as distortion, the sound colors or tones being created, and the anatomy or structure producing those different sounds, ALL on a spectrum. There is only one position or structure that is pure fry, and one that is pure false-cord. Most screams fall in-between, but are either fry dominant or false-cord dominant, rather than a "fry scream" or "false-cord scream." It's not two different things, but a spectrum! The underlying mechanics are the same, while the acoustic placement is the main thing giving you a different tone and determining whether you hear more fry or more false-cord in the resulting sound. It's all a balance of Compression, Constriction, and Acoustics. Let me break it down for you: ***𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 (𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 90% 𝐨𝐟 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐯𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧):*** 1. True Cords (Glottis) = Any defined pitch overtones and extra air through the glottis to assist in saturating the harmonics. Think of it like a really light and airy head voice that has a little bit of vocal fry in it like when you talk or sing too quietly. If more compressed, you push air through, and if more loosely thinned out, it can't help but bleed air. It's the extra air causing the voice to go from a pure tone (aligned harmonics) to chaos (over-saturation of harmonics) in the...

I don't have music to share for Music Monday like I had hoped, but I want to still share something valuable. While I no longer coach music career as my main thing, I still enjoy constantly learning about and keeping up with current music business best practices. While researching the validity of a certain music business book, I accidentally came across the Custom GPT, The Musician's Roadmap. I used this tool to map out a full release plan for my songs, collaborations, and poetry, that fits my brand, genre, goals, ideal fan, and more. But to do that, I had to know how to talk to it about yourself. Otherwise, it give incredibly generic answers. If you're unfamiliar with Custom GPTs, to put it simply, they're an AI conversational interface that's trained on knowledge base files and specific instructions to answer your questions. Trained and instructed correctly, they can be very powerful tools. In this case, The Musician's Roadmap is trained on just about anything you need to grow your music career, from recording to growing a fanbase. Like any Custom GPT, the more detailed information you give it about you and what you're trying to do, the better the answer it will give you. One big trick with AI is to get it to ask you questions to help you come up with better prompts or to ask it better questions, especially if you haven't yet fully figured out how to prompt it or what information to give it. To test it, I gave it general information, just to see what type of answer it gives and if it was worth using. The answer was detailed, but as I told it: "This list is vague and overwhelming. Ask me questions to help me form a better plan based upon my brand, music, ideal fans, and more." That opened up the floodgates. The questions it gave me, which I'll put below, helped it give me a very details plan specifically for me. That started a good back and forth conversation that felt like an extremely well-informed expert was brainstorming ideas with me. Any new ideas I had, I would ask it questions about, which it would then compare to it's knowledge on trends, market, and genres. That led to a whole conversation about possible things to do for social media, fan interaction, release schedule, collaborators, hired guests, other creative offerings, and much more. I now have a full, multi-phase, monthly plan to start moving forward with, and good ideas for how to adapt it as I go.

Now that we're two weeks in and things are starting to settle, I feel like I can finally wish you a Happy New Year! I plan on slowly going through the quotes we've posted on YouTube and Instagram to dive a bit deeper than a quick post can do. Since the year is still relatively new, and people are still trying to get their New Year's Resolutions in order (something Amidei and I go into in our January 1st podcast episode), I thought the most recent quote card to be very relevant: "Life owes you nothing. You owe yourself everything." Corey Taylor, Seven Deadly Sins: Settling the Argument Between Born Bad and Damaged Good. Everything. Stop waiting for a handout, a savior, or to be discovered and then finally have the freedom you want. It’s not worth living in the endless circle of “if only” and going nowhere. You can do this. You can reach for the stars and bring a few back with you. There’s a way. You don’t have to go it alone. Many have gone before you and shined a light on their path. And many would love to join you and support you on your journey. This is especially true for your music career aspirations; it also rings true for anything you hope you could do… if only… Do you really want to model those who have gone before? Allow me to play my own Devil's advocate for a moment. My son, Ender, is a reader. At 18, he's probably read more book than I ever have outside of my 10-year doctorate studies in religion and Middle-Eastern History (a story for another day). Ender, Nadine, and I often talk about what he's reading, sometimes all getting excited to find a life-changing book. when he shared with us Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money Nadine and I ate it up. Nadine even printed out most of his blog. I finally felt like someone was able to sum up my ever-looming question of "why would somebody do that?" You know the question. Humanity being sheeple, being human, seeming to disregard others, or making decisions that are simply dumbfounding. When Housel's book, Same As Ever came out, the answer to that question became even more clear. And I now know why I make so many dumb decisions! Haha!

What have you found yourself always coming back to for inspiration and motivation year after year? There are a couple of things that inspire and motivate me every time I hear them, things I keep coming back to as the years pass. Every few months to a year one of these pops up in my head again and inspires me to feel like i can take on the world, no matter how I feel things have been going. I’m an avid reader and have a list of books that I found life changing. But I don’t tend to reread many books. However, there are a few shorter, more quickly digestible things that I keep coming back to over and over again. I think we all need beacons like that in our lives. They have saved me many times from falling into disappointment in my progress, struggle with hardship, and being on the edge of giving up on my dreams and aspirations. The first, An Invocation for Beginnings, I’ve posted before. The second is Saul Williams’ Pedagogue of Young Gods. ********** Pedagogue of Young Gods by Saul Williams Are you afraid to have someone believe in you? Can you commit to your ideals? Even if you think nothing of it, are you willing to allow others to think the world of it, and of you? Pedagogue of Young Gods. All slavery ever does is free you. All anyone ever does is an example. All power is just collective energy. To abuse the privilege is to sell your soul and that is to rent with the illusion of owning. We are the landlords. If you misunderstand us, you're dead and deserve your demise. Your dominion is your overthrow. The controllers are controlled. Spread the word, it will save you and depends on you to be understood. There is no school bell, only nursery. Our heroes reward us with stars, ever-still, ever-moving. We sing to ourselves in our cars. Music is our sanctuary. Anywhere you put it it's ours. Our living voice, our living testament. We dream aloud, we scream and shout. Our courage will defeat them. Our struggle will unite us. Our wisdom is ourselves, our resources our own,