Melissa is one of the most prominent vocal coaches in the metal scene. She's worked with artists like Slipknot, The Disturbed, Arch Enemy, and helps them achieve those extreme vocals that we all know and love in a safe way.
“A voice is a voice and there’s no classical training and you know, pop training that’s not... it’s just a voice. And a voice, is a voice, is a voice. And the sounds that we make are different sounds but the voice doesn’t change.”
In this episode, Melissa chats to me about her journey from classically trained vocal coach to metal vocal coach shares some technical insights into fry screaming, and talks about the truth behind the stereotypes of metal.
First of all for people who don't know who are you and what do you do?
My name is Melissa Cross, and I'm a vocal instructor. I'm based in New York.
I teach everything except classical although I'm classically trained. But a couple of decades ago almost I was given a challenge and it kinda landed in my lap. A person I went to school with was producing these underground bands, this is like in the mid-nineties or maybe early nineties and it was screaming. I mean it wasn't singing, it was screaming. And he wanted me to get his client through a recording session without coughing blood. And I offered to help out and I had no idea what I was getting into until the guy came. And that student that came then happens to be one of the top metal singers now. So when that student came a bunch of other students lined up.
How did you figure out how to help?
Somehow I'd figured out a way with my training and also always wanted to be Janis Joplin since I was 13. So I've been working on this sound my whole life. So I said okay, instead of saying, Oh, you just can't do that, you gotta stop that. Because when I saw the first concert it was so much like what music was for me in the sixties. I've always been a rock chick even though I'm classically trained, I'm a rock chick. So this whole evolution of the metal thing was just an evolution of who I am. My life kind of goes with the backdrop of what rock is. And so I became, through the last couple of decades the go-to expert in distortion.
When did you start teaching voice?
I started teaching voice in 1990 and my speciality then was to get the Broadway out of Broadway singers because that was a journey that I had made. Actually, went to acting college in the UK, went to the Old Vic Theater School. And I had this epiphany where this guy was trying to get me to sound like, something like rent and I was doing something that sounded like an art song. And I had that transformation when I was younger and so I got really good at what's involved, technically in all that and then I became like a voice geek. Somewhere in like the early eighties when I had an injury because I was in a punk band the first time around and it was not like art songs. There was nobody teaching that sound. So I just threw everything out the window and I got damaged. My recovery from that damage in the eighties, involved some speech therapy. I had a little problem but I didn't have surgery didn't want surgery, I took six months of vocal rest, which is not the wisdom now but at the time that's what it was, six months.
I got this amazing speech therapist, and there was an experience of resonance during the speech training that reminded me of the resonance in classical training. It was through speaking that I realized that it's a voice is a voice and there's no classical training and pop training. The sounds that we make are different sounds but the voice doesn't change. So I started this journey into voice science and I've been in there ever since.
Tell us about your first student…
That first student was Jesse Leach from Kill switch Engage and after that I got, everybody. It's a very tight-knit community.
Do you think that if you have basic singing training that anyone can learn to scream?
Absolutely.
How did you develop the idea of fry scream?
So I developed labels of different kinds of screams and they were based on the function of the voice, not necessarily on the sound and I'm a big flag carrier for defining function instead of defining sounds
It's not about the sound. It's such a horrible mess voice science, because most of the scientifically based research, is in speech science. I had to migrate over to speech science eventually because it was so much conjecture and so much subjectively based assumptions that were being made on the basis of sounds that I realized we just getting into a bigger mess. So, I coined these phrases. Fry screaming I coined in 2004 because it was based on a kind of vocal fry - which is a periodic non-repeating frequency. It's just noise, and it's done at the source - the true vocal folds. Most of the people that were looking at this were looking at the ventricular area, the area above the vocal folds where the constriction would cause the noise and that one is not sustainable for everybody.
What voices do you think that false cord screams work for and where doesn’t it work?
-That particular function doesn't work for Sopranos and Tenors, it's not sustainable. They get beat up. If you're a baritone or even a lyric baritone get away with it. But larger thicker voices can handle aryepiglottic constriction. But most of the people that I teach and I teach a lot of metal people, most of them have kind of settled into a combination of fry screaming and like a hybrid screaming where there's very little constriction.
The constriction doesn't really work out. It's just, too much labour. You can get the same sound by creating this noise at the source, which is the true vocal folds.
What types of screaming do you teach?
I have four different models at this time. One is the fry screaming - it's not very loud. It doesn't need to be loud because the microphone does the work, it picks up all those sub-harmonics, it makes a big flat noise, and it sounds brutal when it's less than conversational volume.
So, I kind of like dropped a bomb on louder is better because louder is a perception. Loud is not an action, Loud is a perception. We need to talk about functions as opposed to sounds. I actually did this amazing high-speed video series where I actually saw that the true folds can do both fry and periodic oscillation at the same time. The front of the folds actually are making a frequency and the back is doing pure fry. There's no constriction there. It was just part of my folds that were doing that. But, anytime anyone does that constriction in the aryepiglottic region, usually, they're doing it with an emotional impetus that is really unhealthy. And eventually, they come to me for that, because I'll undo it.
And is that why it's the Zen Of Screaming - to disconnect to the emotional context?
This is for all vocalizing, no matter what the sound is - you have to be inside the moment cannot conceptualize or think. Once you start to think you're going to the wrong part of the brain that processes nothing to do with singing and it makes you hold your breath and it doesn't sound good. You cannot want to sound like something and make it happen. You have to be in the moment... So that's an imaging thing, and that's why it's called the Zen. Zen means - ”be here now”. I'm not a Buddhist but it's kind of that idea.
What defines metal to you?
Metal is an attitude, it's an identity. It's really not just music. So you know how can recognize a metal kid? You don't know what country they're from. You don't know if they're from Thailand or they might be from Korea, whatever. But you know a metal kid from miles away. When I saw my first concert and I looked down on this sea of moshing people all dressed the same with hand signals. I wanted to be a part of it. It turned out that I got that phone call like a couple of weeks later. And that's the history of the Zen Of Screaming which is that DVD that I put out in 2005 I put out a second one in 2007 and it talks about screaming. The first DVD doesn't talk about screaming very much because in order to scream sustainably you have to learn the basics.
What do you think are the stereotypes of metal? And do you think that they are accurate?
Well all stereotypes are stereotypes, right? So when you get more educated in something, like I'm sure that my mother would always think it sounds like screaming. And when I first heard it in the late eighties on an underground college radio thing, I said, what is that? What are they doing? And then I got more educated about what was bubbling under but when I saw the massive acceptance of it. Metal stereotypically for people who don't know about it is satanic. To me, metal music is so diverse. There are all different kinds of metal and there's even, it used to be really tribal. In the early 2000s, you had a death metal sound, you had a metal core scream, you had like these tribal noises that kind of inferred what kind of metal you work? It was altered time signatures, it was math metal. If it was like arty or ambient, it was like art metal. You know, they had, math metal, art metal, post-punk, hardcore, like all these little tribes. It's not so much like that anymore, but it used to be like that.
What is the metal community like as a whole?
- Most of them that I come into contact with are the nicest people I've ever met. And the most integrity as persons. You can't really stereotype anything, but the idea that these, giant tatted up, pierced up, people walking down my hallway are gonna eat me alive was very quickly dispelled. Everyone was charming and well-mannered and articulate and passionate. Just the people that I want to be with. These are my people, I love these people. Whenever I see somebody that's got a piercing or something I go what are you listening to,
I'm like a zombie, well looking for another zombie right?
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