Your Song Covers

Thinking of starting to take Youtube more seriously and doing one-take/one-shot vocal covers of random songs with video. It's my attempt to kind of get the studio crap out the picture and put myself in a situation where I'm forced to be a bit more consistent. In everything I do I try to do long takes, I don't like the line by line approach, it's too clinical sounding and people lean on it too much. A vast majority of what I record is 2-3 full takes comped using best parts of each.

Still, despite my way of trying to keep things a bit more real, I find that sometimes I get lazy and patch in a bunch of stuff later. Which is fine and basically status quo for studio, but since I no longer play live shows it has also made me more forgiving of bad form, and I don't like the idea of relying on studio magic too much. So basically I figured I'd take it to the next level, and this one-take/one-shot thing forces me to focus more on voice control and if I fuck up bad I have to start the whole video over or accept it on the interweb.

We'll see if it pans out. I don't know much about creating videos and I don't own a decent camera yet. I did a one-take recording of Opeth - Masters Apprentices earlier but it's just audio obviously. It went fairly well considering I have not tried to sing it since I first covered it and posted on the "How to growl" thread like 9 years ago. Also my clean voice is so rusty it's embarassing. But that's the point. It forces me to do better or live with the results.
 
I've got more brutal stuff. Since i havent shouted (again) for quite some time figured i can use this hour drive daily to do some training.

Turns out it's hard to growl while sitting and I cant hit high notes for shit (though I could never have probably because my "clean" singining is nonexistent).

Anyway, decided to fuck around and do a car cover of Beelzeboss by Tenacious D playing all 3 roles. There are some cuts due to phone saving the clip in the memory, but i think only 3-4.



Surprisingly nobody got in an accident during recording which is a rare sight on this road.
 
Since we're on bad phone recordings...

A few months ago I was trying to learn a bit about video and maybe doing some kind of "studio diary" thing so I quickly shot something very rough with my phone. I just propped my phone up on my bed as a test and basically did a live cover of one of our own songs just so I could see how it would look. The mic I'm yelling at isn't even turned on. hahaha

I never went anywhere with it, seemed kind of pointless to start all that up. With that said, since it'll never see the light of day anywhere else, I figured I would just embarrass myself here.

So this is me right after work, half asleep and performing sloppy as fuck unprocessed shitty growls. I normally wouldn't share something so rough and sloppy, but I've decided to embrace the shittiness for lulz. :lol:





Edit: For a reference, here is a short part of the demo version of the actual track. It's even the same section of the song. Check it out if any of you fuckers want to hear something still in the works.

 
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Fake News, I clicked to hear some embarassment but your unprocessed growls still sound better than 90% of the shit you see on youtube.

But since were talking embarassment - I never did any serious cover with me on the video. I just dont know what to do with my body/hands and I hate exeggerating while I shout satanic verses. But then again doing a cover where some random dude just stands calmly, with relaxed face making raging baboon sounds doesnt look good either. Check mate :(

Same reason why I never joined any band that wanted to play live. No thank you, i dont know how to entertain people while you tune your guitar, I dont know how to act metal and I dont want to risk talking in gay voice during the show in case i rape my throat with growling.
 
I don't really notice what my body is doing while in a bedroom/studio setting. I look like a dolt in that video above, on stage I actually focus on movements but that's a very different environment. Stage shit is all experience I think. First bunch of shows you're usually a wreck and standing still trying to keep your composure. After that you just figure out what's comfortable. I mean, Corpsegrinder just windmills until he has generated enough power to provide electricity for France, and the rest of the time he stands as rigid as possible and growls, and people love their live show.
 
I totally agree with Lifemocker here; your vocals sounds great Caleb, even without effects! It also looks like it comes really easy for you. You've probably already discussed this in the growl-thread, but could you explain your technique a bit? How loud is your growl volume wise, and do you use a lot of air doing it?


Found it funny btw when you're screaming "resist" (?), because it kinda sounds like "racist", haha
 
I don't even know how to really describe my technique anymore, over the years I would change my style around and eventually I started combining everything into a hybrid growl. I tend to mix and match techniques and pitches rapidly. I open my throat up a lot and compress at the same time near the bottom of the throat/top of chest to get kind of a cavernous sound. I also alternate use of false vocal chords and combine it with vocal fry for certain types of midrange growls. Plus I unintentionally move my tongue into different positions when I want to quickly change the tone of the vocals on the fly. A lot of it has become instinctual.

Fuck, I dunno it's hard to describe because I change what I'm doing depending on the song/band. If I'm trying to do Chuck Schuldiner I compress my voice a lot and focus all my airflow through the upper section of my throat, same with Peter Tagtgren, or if I'm going for a Cannibal Corpse sound I just bellow it out forcefully. I don't spend much time talking about growls anymore since the growl thread died, so I've kind of lost context.

As for volume, it's quite loud, my neighbours have told me that they can hear me fairly clear from their family room and their house is about 75 meters away plus the outer walls of our homes. Basically my growl volume is comparable to unrestrained yelling, like maybe 75-80% volume.

I do use quite a lot of air though, it depends on how much aggression I need to add. In the video of me acting like a dunce I posted above I wasn't warmed up, so I had to take breathes in places I normally wouldn't, but I do lose most of my air between syllables. Like I can hold any pitch growl for around 10 seconds, but if I try to growl a sentence with a lot of syllables I need to take a breath after 4-5 seconds.

Sorry I know that's not a good answer. It probably raises more questions than it answers. I tried but this post is already getting TL;DR.

And the last word is "resist", but if I wear a KKK hoodie I could probably trick a few people. :lol:
 
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Haha, growling is a jungle, so any tips/info available helps when trying out new stuff :D My growl is a lot quieter then by comparison, so stuff like this helps finding out what to change/improve, I also run out of breath a lot quicker than you do.
How would you say you "start" the growl technique, is it kind of like a dog bark, or more like a heavy/raspy sigh, or something completely different?


Canadian KKK "sorry, didn't mean to be racist" :lol:
 
Turns out I can maintain pretty long low growl but high growl is like 50% shorter, so I'm probably pushing a lot of air out to not make it sound extra flat, is it the same for you guys? Im just talking regular growls not high pitched screams because thats completely different technique, at least for me.

And since were talking growls I'm also interested to hear your opinions one one more thing (but that's for people who speak other languages than english).
I can growl comfortably in english, but growling in polish is absolutely terrible and sounds lame as fuck because of the sounds you make it completely doesnt fit regular technique. Black metal screams though, they fit perfectly.

I'd assume it will be linked to language groups(famililes?) but who the fuck knows.
 
DarkGift said:
Haha, growling is a jungle, so any tips/info available helps when trying out new stuff :D My growl is a lot quieter then by comparison, so stuff like this helps finding out what to change/improve, I also run out of breath a lot quicker than you do.
How would you say you "start" the growl technique, is it kind of like a dog bark, or more like a heavy/raspy sigh, or something completely different?


Canadian KKK "sorry, didn't mean to be racist" :lol:
Click to expand...


How I start a growl depends on the sound of the first syllable. That's maybe a bit obvious but I'm not really sure what else to say there. Sometimes I start the growl very sudden, other times I roll into it.

Lifemocker said:
Turns out I can maintain pretty long low growl but high growl is like 50% shorter, so I'm probably pushing a lot of air out to not make it sound extra flat, is it the same for you guys? Im just talking regular growls not high pitched screams because thats completely different technique, at least for me.

And since were talking growls I'm also interested to hear your opinions one one more thing (but that's for people who speak other languages than english).
I can growl comfortably in english, but growling in polish is absolutely terrible and sounds lame as fuck because of the sounds you make it completely doesnt fit regular technique. Black metal screams though, they fit perfectly.

I'd assume it will be linked to language groups(famililes?) but who the fuck knows.
Click to expand...

I asked that same question in the growl thread years ago. I also wonder if someone who natively speaks Swedish (for example) might have an easier time growling because of how they use their voice differently from someone who is English or Spanish. Different inflections and accents. Does their accent and the way they speak make it easier to growl in English? Could it be that silly accent happens to make a great demon voice?? Just as an example.
 
Ok, so it kind of depends on what sound you're after for that particular part I guess? Is the volume the same-ish no matter how you do it, or does it change depending on what type of growl you're using?

Haven't thought about the language thing but then again, I never growl in Swedish because it sounds weird to me. I can imagine that growling in Polish is hard due to the language using so many consonants in the words, while singing/growling is more focused on the vowels.
 
I think normal growls wont work in any language with hard "R" because no matter what I do i need to "break" the technique to speak the proper "r". It's easier in high screams but also i very deep growls. But in polish besides hard "r" you also have shitton of "sh" "tsch" and similiar sounds that dont even exist in english so normal growls are like 30% growling 70% trying not to sound like a retard with lisp.

Im glad my shitpost cover inspired Belac to spark a new fun discussion :3
 
I didn't mean to start it, I was kind of making fun of myself. :lol: Hey whatever works though.

Volume does change, it's hard to tell in the video because once the music is turned up it normalized the volume of everything, plus I'm about 8 feet from the phone so the room effects how that shitty little mic picks up the sound. High growls and lows are loudest for me, the mid growls it depends on how I project it but they tend to be a little bit quieter. Nothing drastic though. Unless I am going with really deep growls which are a little quieter too but I almost never use those.

In every recording you've heard from me I didn't mix the vocals separately or adjust volumes, they are mostly on one vocal track (except backing vocals) so volume wise it's pretty balanced.
 
I was listening to the Desolator EP recently and I started screaming along. Faceless God is actually one of my favourite death metal tracks at this point. So I chose to record some of that just for the arseholes hanging around here! It was hard to find a proper volume for the vocals so hopefully it's clear, I put them 6db above the mix. Faceless God already has tons of vocal layers, and I added two more vocal layers in order to cover it properly, so me piling on was a hard balance to figure out. :eek:. It's somewhat sloppy, I've been drinnking beer and I fucked up a couple lines. I didn't record the beginning screams. I got interupted.

:kickass:

:)



Edit : Beer rambling
 
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