I want to develop vocal techniques like tsuzuku (mejibray) miyuki (kebyo) juka/shaura (moi dix mois) but I don’t knoe where to start
Can anyone help? I’m not familiar with any vocal practices btw I just try to sound like them but I end up hurting my throat
here’s a reply you probably didn’t expect. Tsudzuku’s vibrato is really different than most other vkei singers’ - Jojo from The Gallo is the only vocalist i know of who does something similar.
Theirs is styled much more like vibrato from the balkans rather than italy. So a lot of people say their vibrato is ‘wrong’ or ‘fake’ or otherwise lacking in style. But it’s not - it’s just a different way of adding flavour to a voice.
As far as how to do it - i have no idea. But maybe looking into balkan vibrato might be worthwhile, if imitating Tzk’s less-than-usual voice is your goal!
Also, idk anything about MDM; they’re not exactly my type of vkei so i haven’t looked much into them. But bc you say Tzk & Miyuki -
They both sing w/ most of their resonance in the mask. Again, i have no idea what that means - but when vocal instructors ‘put their resonance in the mask’ they sound more like how Tzk & Miyuki do. Sometimes i can get closer to this sound by visualizing my singing voice coming more from the front of my face - like between my nose and mouth - rather than my throat or chest. But i really don’t know how to put this into super concrete terms.
Another thing about Tzk, he’s great at what i call ‘biting’ a note. Think of Nepenthes, how he sounds like “kimi GA matsu, teBUru ni” on the second half of the chorus. I’m guessing here, but vocal instructors might describe this as putting a lot of compression onto those syllables, much more than the rest of the line. Enough compression that it heads towards distortion, without being an outright harsh vocal. A lot of metal vocalists can use all these techniques (singing clean, with breath support, compression, distortion, harsh vocals (like screaming)) but something Tsudzuku does well, that characterizes his singing, is popping in distortion (by way of compression) for one syllable in an otherwise clean line. Yomi from Naitomea is also great at this!
Bottom line tho, the voice (so i’ve heard) isn’t like a bicep or ab muscles. It’s more like a knee - you can wear it down and wear it out. Pain here isn’t “the cost of getting stronger” but a warning something is wrong. A good test (so i’ve heard) is singing falsetto - if you can sing cleanly and pleasantly, your voice hasn’t been hurt. But if your falsetto gets scratchy and whispery, that’s a good sign to reign in the day’s practice and focus on hydration.
Don’t forget warmups and drinking water even when you don’t think you have to!
Long response lol but these are all my considerations i’m paying attention to myself, as a D-tier vocalist who loves vkei and is trying to get better.
I do a lot of visual kei vocal covers, I would say that the techniques aren’t particularly unique compared to other genres, just the way they are employed.
Many of them sing more towards the mask when it comes to positioning, ie the front of their face, so it might be worth looking into vocal placement techniques.
With this you can make the sound more bright without making it sound overly nazally.
A lot of them have quite “home made” techniques though, and are somewhat sloppy with things like support and breath control, but I don’t think this is the case with the 3 bands you listed (I’m not too familiar with them)
About the “fake” vibrato; I don’t know about the bands you mentioned but with some other singers the reason people say it’s often “fake” is because vibrato is something that happens naturally in your voice when the support muscles and compression are properly dialed in, but in many cases in VK they emulate this sound by modulating the pitch, so essentially a trill. It’s not a bad thing though,
and it does have a different sound to it, which sounds somewhat distinctly VK compared to pop singers who usually vibrato the more natural way, but there are a lot of VK singers who do it the natural way too.
I’ve noticed a lot more VK singers using fry for different kinds of screams and sounds these days too. You can do a lot with fry and it can be utilized in basically every register to some degree.
You can make thin vocals sound really powerful with it to, many power metal vocalists use it that way, and Chester Bedington did for example
As for the highs that some vocalists like Kyo, Lime and Mama’s vocalist do, around their A4-F4 range is a mix voice and higher than that is a well supported head. Lime’s mix is crazy good though so it’s hard to tell where it begins and ends.
Kyo does a heady mix while lime does a chesty mix. For that kind of thing it might be worth watching some of Chris Liepe’s videos. Those kind of highs are pretty hard to get dialed in at first, it took me a long time to be able to sing a lot of Dir en grey’s stuff.
And of course kyo uses whistle register too, usually with fry, to get really high and wailey. Again it uses a lot less effort and power than it sounds, but the fry just makes it sound so huge and piercing.
Did I mention how useful fry is?
Oh and VK singers use a tonne of falsetto, especially the ones who never use mix voice in their music
Overall I think the most important things to learn about as a beginnner are proper support and how to project your voice, as well as placement of your vocals. Support will help you with stamina, accuracy, volume control and projection… Support really is the key to improving every other area of your voice, and I learned this the time consuming way.
You can feel the support sensation in your abdomen if you blow really hard through a straw for example, or try to blow out a candle quite far from your mouth.
Sorry I’m really bad at explaining stuff well, I’m mostly self taught and picked up on terminology and stuff quite late.
Compared to western music theory ? Scooping. Unless you’re in jazz or certain varieties of r&b (where you’re then talking about african influence), western music theory LOVES hard pitch accuracy. Starting on a certain note and staying on it.
A lot of VKei acts will start either flat or sharp and lean into the note. In western music theory we call this scooping or glissando and it’s almost always seen as a bad thing or something that needs fixing
Though this is also going away with the standardization of pitch correction. It’s now very common for vocaloid singers to be pitch corrected flat but otherwise a lot of them will be pitch corrected in a way that eliminates that scooping but it’d still be present in live performances
Somewhat related, but what kind of scream is Sho’s famous vanitas momentum?
Because while I can nail standard screams when I try to experiment it either becomes your angry grandma scream (high pitch fry) or I just start coughing.
Whistle fry
I’m pretty sure this is achieved by inhale scream. It sounds like it and i do it in that way.
This is also something I heard about him somewhere in general, but have no idea how to do that
The mid-ranged screams during the heavy part of the song are definitely inhaled (most of them at least).
Similarly high screams can be done on exhale but these do give the impression of being inhaled to me.
I covered that just recently and did it with a well supported whistle register, with a lot of vocal compression.
I’m convinced it’s not inhaled because it’s really long that you need good support to get through it, and you can hear it transition into some exhaled sounds, especially live, but I would like to see someone demonstrate it inhaled.