Pretty much EVERY VKei singer does “scooping”. As in they start a little bit flat or sharp then sort of lean into the note. Ruki, Gackt, Ryu, Toshi, Yomi, Tatsuro, Kamijo, Kaya, Hide etc, they all either used to do it or still do. But every vocal coach will tell you it’s bad technique. But I learned to prefer it over straight notes.
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A lot of “bad technique” is just “doesn’t sound how I like or how I was taught music should sound be done”.
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i don’t know what fake and real vibrato are supposed to mean lol
but check out this guy (Farya Faraji) doing what he calls a Balkan style of vibrato and tell me that’s not the Tsudzuku™ or Jojo
link should start at 30:48 w/ a bit of Turkish posture for context; Balkan right after
i’d be so curious to hear about the history and modern sound of vkei from the point of view of a vocal coach and ethnomusicologist - even as an amateur from the US i can imagine a lot of influence from enka vocals onto vkei
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speaking of lack thereof - i’ve heard from more than a few people i sing like english isn’t my first language, or something else to the effect of what i do is different than what’s done here
so just for fun & bc looking at different styles is interesting to me, i tried an experiment - i sung the intro to a song from a band i play guitars for first in my style, then doing my best to sing in the standard american style. Then, third is the guy who’s the actual vocalist, who does a lot better at this style than me.
i’m half fucking around, half genuinely curious how the differences in my style & american style would be described, bc as likely demonstrated, i can’t just ‘switch it off’ and sing ‘regular’ by US standards. Even convincing my muscle memory to not do vibrato was surprisingly harder than i thought it’d be!
Ah interestingly enough, this vocal melody was written by XiL way back in 2014, so one way or another it’s ended up a bit of a vkei melody performed by a metalcore singer.
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I’ve always thought Hazuki from lynch. is one of the best vocalists in the scene. He’s got a good range, his growls hit hard and have a howling quality to them (earlier in his career anyways), there’s a dark richness to his tone, and he sings incredibly clean. He can also change styles on the dime. I think there’s a reason Ai chased that sound in Deathgaze.
I also love Diasuke from Kagerou. He has a unique voice and his execution is always flawless. His voice is higher in pitch but it has so much power behind it. There’s a precision in his performances that you can feel and he’s able to shift his vocal style, what sounds like, with hardly any effort. He can growl pretty well but it doesn’t seem like it’s his focus. Must be why his voice remained so clean till the end of his career. He has an explosive technique that makes his singing feel bold even if he’s not screaming. My favorite example of this is Creepy Crawly when he was in The Studs.
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The one thing I struggle with is the prevalence of “nasally” vocals in VKei and Japanese music more broadly.
There are a ton of bands I wish I enjoyed more; but the vocals get in the way. My favorite band is Dir en grey, and even there I sometimes find myself going “dude, just shut the fuck up for a second”.
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I took a listen and it sounds like you’re doing a mix of just pronouncing things differently (which all vocalists do, because it does indeed sound odd to sing in our “speaking” cadence) and doing some weird modulation with your breath and voice that’s kind of hard to discern.
Real vibrato is not something that we trigger at will. It’s a product of the relaxation of your voice-related muscles when singing with correct, healthy technique, which is not easy to achieve. Think of opera singers.
Fake vibrato imitates that sound on cue by doing things like wiggling your jaw, singing in a wobbly pitch, forcing air out to make your muscles vibrate, and other “tricks”.
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Haha i have had the same thoughts actually. Especially in some of the live stuff, DeG and Kizu come to mind immediately when thinking about vocalists who add too much. Like, stop trying to drown out everyone else and let them shine please.
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agrees in The Unraveling
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Balkan “goat” vibrato goes so hard though. I love it but in the west people think it sounds “weird”. Mainstream singers seem to want to minimize their vibrato
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Based on earlier examples this is what I was assuming “fake vibrato” was referring to. I believe this is done by doing rapid glottal stops (stopping the vocal folds from vibrating then starting again quickly). Tiptoe Through the Tulips sounds like this is being done - as an example from the west. Whereas “real vibrato” is done by alternating between stretching and loosening your vocal folds to alternate pitch without ever stopping them from vibrating. I love both sounds.
Singing and wobbling jaw kind of has a vibrato-like effect but sounds weird. Doesn’t feel like something that would be harmful though. Changing the amount of air pressure you’re applying is similar in both regards.
Another discussion: in the metal community there is a mantra “scream with your diaphragm, not your throat” which is supposed to be the key to not losing your voice. But those two things have no overlap in function and both are involved in all vocalizations. Being good at using your diaphragm to put in the right amount of air and using the tissue in your throat in a way that you can keep your voice at least long enough to finish your performance in a way that’s satisfactory for you is good but if you’re telling people to do that then you’re basically just telling them to “get good”. It would still be better than telling them something that makes a negative amount of sense though. And in the case of “it just means don’t compensate for a lack of pushing enough air with your diaphragm by using your throat in the wrong way” then it’s more likely the opposite you need to worry about. Don’t compensate for using your throat the wrong way by applying tons of air pressure with your diaphragm. So if anything it should be “scream with your throat, not your diaphragm”. But really either statement should be retired. You need to be using both in precise ways.
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It either means that they are bad in biology (idk if it’s correct or not btw) or that you should push the air out from there since that’s what I do when I scream. And yeah, you use your throat as well, but that’s not the origin point of the force in your scream, just a tool that shapes it like your tongue placement etc. Or at least that’s what I feel when doing it.
Generally, if it hurts when you’re trying to scream you are doing it bad, and that’s what usually happens when you generate the scream in your throat like a crying baby.
You can’t “generate a scream in your throat”. Your diaphragm compresses the air out, your vocal cords and/or false cords vibrate from the air to create the sound, and the rest of the shape of your mouth further modifies how it sounds. This is how every vocalization works - whether or not they’re damaging to your vocal cords. When you scream at the top of your lungs in a way that makes you hoarse (like a baby) you are definitely putting in tons of pressure with your diaphragm - you go hoarse when all that pressure is put on your vocal cords in a harsh way.
I think what you’re experiencing is that using your throat some ways hurts and other ways doesn’t and then attributing the ones that hurt as being “generated in the throat” but they are both generated in the diaphragm and throat. The ones that hurt are just bad positioning of the vocal cords.
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I’m bad in biology so I accept what you said.
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Reminder/disclaimer: I am absolutely not a voice professional or anything remotely of the sort, just someone who likes science and reads a lot of stuff
This is one of the ways that vibrato is faked. It’s not glottal stops happening here (that would be quite difficult because the glottis/epiglottis just CAN’T open and close that quickly, it’s pushing air out to force the vocal cords to alternate between engaging and disengaging quickly. You’ll recreate the effect if you try to make a fake laugh sound by saying “hahahahahahahahaha” as fast as possible. This is what’s going on in Tiptoe Through the Tulips. If you watch a live recording, you can hear the breathiness in his falsetto coming through very clearly,
I just want to clear this up a bit. “Real” vibrato is produced when you are singing a SINGLE tone, but the tremors in your vocal system produce the slight variations in pitch. Research shows that it is NOT something that induced, but a neuromuscular response to the strain of singing. That trembling is helpful in reducing the stress on your vocal cords, but is hard to achieve because it requires relaxation of a whole lot of specific muscles we rarely think of.
Rapidly alternating pitch is a major strain on the voice, even though it can sound very close to true vibrato. The only difference it comes down to is how well the singer’s voice holds up, which is why being able to have true vibrato isn’t a big deal unless you sing for a living and need a working voice day after day.
This is largely because most people starting metal vocals aren’t exactly likely to have studied singing technique before, and using the diaphragm is something that most people are not familiar with. It’s definitely something that needs repeating because the basics of healthy technique are more important than the more technical stuff that comes later.
You’re supposed to insult my perceived sexuality and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about.
How can you call it fake if it sounds different and is used preferentially/stylistically over the other type. This is what I mean by “incorrect technique” often being “this isn’t how I was taught to sing this one other genre of music”. If someone was singing opera and using this technique and saying they were doing the same thing as traditional opera singers instead of just adding their own flavor to the genre then I guess you could say it’s fake vibrato. But that’s not what’s happening here. A statement that opera singers use improper technique to fake goat vibrato would be equally true and fair.
The consonantal sound of the vocal cords being disengaged is a glottal stop.
Tremors where? In the muscles that elongate and shorten the vocal cords to control pitch?
If the singer has control over when they sing with vibrato and when they don’t then for all intents and purposes it’s induced.
It’s a false dichotomy that leaves people with a perception of what’s going on that’s so incorrect to the point of being bizarre. Often in the form of people thinking sound is being created by a muscle horrifyingly misplaced somewhere in their intestines. The diaphragm is the main muscle used in breathing so most people are familiar with it in some way. When it comes to using it to sing well - that’s like learning to balance and is all going to come down to practice and experimentation. People being good at screaming while thinking the sound is coming from the diaphragm is proof you don’t actually need any idea of how the mechanisms work to do it well. Maybe understanding it would help get some people going but this statement is doing the opposite of that.