Chris Cornell was, in my opinion, one of the most naturally gifted rock singers ever to live. Although he is widely regarded as a founding member of the Seattle grunge movement, he was a force of nature that couldn’t be neatly placed into any genre and had a wide range of influences. His work was interesting, bold, technically brilliant, but heartfelt. How did he achieve this? What makes Chris Cornell great?
Technique
Range
Chris Cornell had an incredible 4-octave range. Although Chris is technically a baritone because of his lower range and warmth of tone, he has an outstanding high mix that is well-produced and manages to maintain that warmth. To understand how incredible his range is, let's look at an average baritone male voice. The average baritone has a range of 1.4 to 2 octaves, so let's say around an F2 to a D4. A trained baritone has an average range of 1.7 to 2.4 octaves, so around an F2 to G4 or an extreme of an A4. Chris’s range was C sharp 2 to a reliable full-voiced A5. What's more, he can sing this both in a head voice and a mighty mixed voice. To be quite frank, I would struggle with that as a soprano, and he is a baritone. You can hear Chris' A5s from early on in his career. And yes, it is a mixed voice!
And he could, of course, sing in a light falsetto voice.
And his warm baritone lows. One of which is also from Jesus Christ Pose, where you heard his highest mixed note.
Chris' range did change throughout the years. There are rumours about vocal surgery, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true due to his lifestyle and extreme singing style, especially in the early days. A loss of range is normal as you age, but he did push his voice and body to their limits. However, this did not stop him from making some of the best music he ever did.
"As time has moved on, I have less range and less ability to easily go in and out of different registers, but I feel like I have a much better ability to emotionally connect with any song.”
I definitely agree with this. Although the energy, power and range of his early days are awe-inspiring, I love the warmth and emotion that he grew into. This is my favourite performance of Chris’, ‘When I’m Down live at the Troubadour in London’. I recommend checking it out. If I saw my reaction to it, I cried. It does pull at the heartstrings.
Tone and Registers
Contrary to most grunge singers who had lighter high tenor voices, Chris had a warm baritone voice with the ability to rise through the registers into the tenor range with power and ease whilst still maintaining his baritone warmth. When he was younger, his voice had a thick honey tone with outstanding clarity and ease at the top of his range. He could quickly switch between registers, allowing him a vast range of textures and pick and choose when he wanted to use distortion.
As he aged, his voice took on a slightly more husky breathy distorted edge throughout his range. You can see the tension in his neck that he didn’t have before as he pushes to reach notes. It’s a little harder work for him than it was before.
To me, this does point to some vocal damage, as a long term husky voice is often the result of chronically swollen vocal cords. The vocal damage would have almost certainly been caused by both his lifestyle and a gruelling schedule. But considering his struggle with addiction, he maintained his tone for a very long time, and it wasn't until the 2010s that his voice started to get this texture; this is a credit to his natural technique and breath support. When his voice did change, he adapted fantastically, making the most of the limitations of his voice and personally, I love his work from his later years. Word of warning for those who want that voice, although it does sound cool, the downside to vocal damage is that he would have had less control over his voice and registers and had a loss of range, and not all of us can adapt well as Chris could.
Breath Support
Although Chris never had a singing lesson, he was incredibly intuitive in listening to what his voice needed and was able to teach himself. You can hear the difference in his voice as he practised between 1988 and 1991.
This is one of the most important notes I think a singing student can take on, listening to your body and how your voice feels. When it feels good, you’ve got it right. I think Chris was very good at listening to and understanding how his voice feels in his body. This is something most people have to work on with a coach, but he did it intuitively.
Although his music had punch, apart from in some live performances, his default wasn’t to push too much and had excellent breath support. In short, it means his breathing was relaxed, and he didn’t force out too much air or too little air when achieving a note. This allowed him to move seamlessly through the registers, maintain his beautiful tone, use the entirety of his range, and protect his voice whilst singing extreme vocals. One of the things that helped him was the way he gets onto a note. There are three main ways to get onto a note.
A breathy onset: the breath starts before the note.
A glottal onset: press the vocal cord together tightly, build up the air behind them and pop them open.
A simultaneous onset: breath and the note start at the same time.
Simultaneous onsets are the least wearing on the voice but require a relaxed, gentle start to each note and can take a bit of time to train in. The other types of onsets aren’t terrible for you if used on and off as a stylistic nuance, but the problems happen when these are the default rather than a stylistic choice and especially if combined with excessive air pressure. Your ideal for vocal health is to have a default of simultaneous onsets with enough but not excessive breath support, with the other onsets used sparingly for emotional expression. This is precisely what Chris Cornell did, using very gentle glottal onsets to add attack as a stylistic choice every now and again. You can hear a gentle glottal on the first ‘all’ to give it a little extra punch while it is lower in his range and then that really nice simultaneous onset on the second ‘all’ in this clip of Like A Stone.
Resonance
Resonance comes hand in hand with breath support. Chris generally used resonance to boost the sound rather than pushing too much. He understood that if he shaped his vocal tract in different ways, the tube above the voice box and the mouth, he could create different tones and perceived volumes. He could shift between twang, nasality and darker, warmer sounds quickly and easily, shaping his voice's tonal quality to create a musical and emotional picture, sometimes adding compression to make a more direct tone. He had an innate understanding and playful attitude towards shaping his vocal tract, resulting in a healthy technique with a vast range of tonal qualities. Here is Chris showcasing all those vocal textures in his cover of I Will Always Love You.
Vowels
This idea of shaping the vocal tract also shows in how Chris used his vowels to help him produce the tone, resonance and attack he wishes on each note. His vowels are generally open, with what sounds like a neutral or low larynx, a relaxed tongue for the main part, raised soft palate and a relaxed jaw. Listen to how he changes his vowel on the word ‘me’ to ‘may’ in Say Hello 2 Heaven to help him get up to that higher note and have an open free sound.
He spends significantly more time singing on the vowel than on the consonant, especially opening up as he gets to his higher mixed voice. When producing his incredible mix, his technique is generally on point, with breath support, larynx, tongue, jaw and soft palate working together in a lovely relaxed way. However, he breaks the rules and plays around with some of these elements in his chest voice, allowing them to drop to add to the emotion of a song. Sometimes closing the vowel, barely opening his mouth, singing through his teeth, and playing, with the feeling of freedom and tension from different jaw positions. You can see that in this fabulous performance of Nothing Compares 2 U. You’ll also notice, his consonants are generally soft, and smooth giving his voice an uninterrupted rolling quality.
In his earlier days, Chris did an interesting thing with tongue tension, in his lower range, using his tongue to push down and lower his larynx. This happened all the time stylistically in the grunge movement; Eddie Vedder does it a lot. It is not something that everyone can do, especially if you want to hit high notes easily. To get to those higher notes, we really need to relax our tongue as much as possible and get it out of the way. If you have tongue tension even in the lower part of the range it can be hard to let it go off and can stop you moving up to a higher range with freedom. Personally, I need to make sure my tongue is relaxed in my entire range or it gets in the way when I try to sing higher notes. Chris Cornell seemed to put this on in the lower range and release reasonably easily for the freedom in the higher range.
But this sound is even more interesting. Shaping of the tongue in this way is a technique used in polyphonic overtone singing to create two notes sung at once. Check out this amazing clip and MRI scan of a singer called Anne-Marie Hefele who is an expert at this technique! If you listen to “Show Me How To Live” you can hear Chris is doing just this, creating two notes at once! However, as he got older, he did drop this technique and developed more ease in his lower range.
Pitch
I’m about to say something that may be a bit controversial about Chris' technique. His basic technique was excellent but his pitching was not always perfect especially in the times when he was dealing with addiction. I actually find it very refreshing, in a time when everything is autotuned to perfection, to hear the slides, cracks, pitch wobbles and humanity in his singing. At the end of the day, technique wasn’t his aim and in my opinion shouldn’t be anyones. His natural technique was a tool to help him express and connect with listeners in a healthy way and if he had to drop to that to connect then he would. If there was the odd flat note then it didn’t matter because that expression and connection was there and if his voice wasn’t on point that day, and his control slipped he always showed up with that emotional connection and that is what is important for audiences.
Emotional Expression
Chris Cornell had an excellent technical voice, but what made him stand out is how he made us feel. As I always say with great artists, part of that emotional connection goes beyond what can be explained; however, there are always some elements that can be. What tools did Chris Cornell use that made him stand above other singers?
Distortion
Chris Cornell generally sings with what sounds like a healthy distortion. He can put it on and take it off at will, adding a grittier emotional edge to some of his belted notes. When our vocal cords are vibrating in regular waves we hear that as a clean sound. When distortion happens, something disrupts those regular waves and makes them irregular. We hear that as noise or distortion. It is impossible to tell without a laryngoscopy of Chris Cornell when singing. But there are a couple of different distortions he could be using, false vocal folds or vestibular folds distortion or a hybrid of vocal fry and false cord. The false vocal cords are folds of ligament and mucus membrane that lie above the vocal cords and whose main job is to protect the vocal cords. When they get in the way of the airflow and vibrations from the vocal cords and disrupt it, you get distortion. The science around extreme vocals is still really new, and there is a lot to be learned. But some recent research suggests that some distortions can happen at the vocal cord level in fry distortion, with small parts of the vocal cords themselves moving in aperiodically. Chris could have been doing a combination at times but certainly, false cords were involved. However, what is important is that his distortions were controlled for the main part of his career and did not come from tension in the neck or excessive air pressure.
Blues
Unlike many other grunge singers whose singing style was more rooted in punk, Chris Cornell took elements from Blues and even covered Howlin Wolf’s song Smokestack Lightning. Chris used many blues techniques sliding between notes and pitch bending rather than hitting them dead on. Using riffs and runs on pentatonic and blues scales, singing clashing ‘blues’ notes to add tension and, of course, his rasp and distortion. Although his voice was hugely versatile, he carried these nuances throughout his genre-defying repertoire.
Instruments and Musicality
Chris Cornell was a fantastic all-around musician. He started out as a drummer, and this comes across as his rhythm is excellent. Much like the rest of his voice, he has a solid sense of rhythm that he uses as default, but also he knows when to break the rules and plays with sitting behind the beat and adding more fluid conversational rhythms, like in blues music.
His sense of rhythm also comes out in his choice of time signatures in his songwriting, sometimes opting for something more unusual like 7/4. Although he does make some unique choices musically, they always seem emotionally intentional. In this case, adding a feeling of unease. This theme also extends to his excellent guitar playing, sometimes using unusual open chords and key changes but always playing with a solid technical base.
Social Context
Aside from being a fantastic solo artist and lead singer of three bands, Chris was someone who was able to take his trauma and pain and change it into something that helped many people around the world - his music. But it also went far beyond the music, “I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to make a career doing something I love…. I’m in a fortunate position to use music to support important causes that help foster change.” Chris started a foundation with his wife Vicki to support children facing homelessness, poverty, abuse and neglect. He used his platform to shine a light on the Armenian Genocide. He spoke out against the glorification of drug use, telling interviewers that we don’t talk about the ordinary people who die every day of overdosing. “It’s a shame that famous people get all the focus because it then gets glorified a little bit, like, ‘This person wa too sensitive for the world,’ and, ‘A light twice as bright lives half as long,’.... It’s not true.” Chris was not just a great singer hoped to make the world a better place, help people through music and beyond, and turn trauma into a catalyst for change.
