David Wu breaks down six common mistakes people make when learning fry screams, with fixes for each one. If you're working on your screaming technique, this covers the specific errors holding you back.
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Hey, my name is David, and I helped countless people all over the world safely unlock their Fry and false chord screams. In this video, I want to discuss the most common mistakes I see people run into when learning to fry scream.
This first problem is something that took me years to learn how to fix for my students. This problem made it so that Dave sounded airy, whispery and quiet. But after fixing this problem together, his screams got super loud. Yeah, so what most people do when they have this problem is that they start their scream with a whisper, and then they try and compress and add distortion to it. But just like a house with a weak foundation, the resulting scream will always be weak and quiet. If you do this instead, we need to have a strong foundation of voice as the base of the scream. So either head voice, mixed voice, or chest voice. And when you can successfully replace a whisper bass with a voice bass, you're going to get much louder, fuller screams that feel better. And just a heads up, how you do this depends on the type of Fry you're going for. If you want a quick breakdown and some exercises, there's a link below. Now back to the video. Mistake number two. When people have this problem, I feel terrible. This is because they usually think they have Fry screams down, but I have to kind of burst their bubble. These people sound like this, but just because it's a high sound doesn't make it a Fry scream. And if this sounds like you, what's happening is that you're flapping your vestibular folds to do a high false chord scream. Instead, you need to close your vocal cords to get them to sputter together to create a Fry scream.
Common mistake number three. A lot of people think that vocal Fry is the same thing as Fry screaming. They're like related cousins, but they are not the same thing. Vocal Fry happens when your vocal cords are closed together, but acting like this. Fry distortion happens when your vocal cords are closed, but with more tension and more air pressure. And they're acting like this.
The next common mistake. After I learned my first Fry scream, I couldn't go as high as I wanted. I just thought, hey, maybe my voice just isn't meant to go higher after all. I do have a medium low dude voice, but after I fixed this mistake, I was able to go way higher. Before. Let me explain. Before, I was screaming in my talking register and trying to force that to go higher. But just like someone trying to run a foot race by walking on their hands, I was using the wrong muscles instead. What I needed to do was Learn to scream in my Mickey Mouse voice. Can't you tell by me even just talking up here that it's way higher? Yeah, well, the same thing applies to your screams. This next mistake is what happened to Richard, who's in the band called Via Sky. He already sounded super sick, but couldn't get as low as he wanted, even though he was screaming at a pro level for years. But after we fixed this problem, he was able to go way lower than ever before, even lower than his false chords. My voice has never sounded like that, bro. It was insane. I was like, holy shit. Let me explain how so many people feel like they get a Fry scream, but when they try and go low with it, the tone thins out. This is because those people are screaming from this nasal area. But if you want to go lower, you can also scream from this lower area in the bottom of your throat. So instead of being placed up here, it's placed down here. And if you get the distortion from this new lower place, then it will actually get you lower than not just your previous Fry, but your false chords as well. This next mistake is one I struggled with a lot. It made me feel a whole lot of pain and made me sound kind of like a robot or a didgeridoo or even kind of throat. Singing like this is the problem that made me too scared to practice screaming and made me give up so many times. So when you're Fry screaming, you only want to use these tissues. But a lot of people also include these tissues that make you sound like a buzzery robot. These tissues have more sensitive pain receptors that can lead you to feel itchy, dry, and scratchy. So as long as we avoid those, we are good for a Fry scream. Okay, now here's the saddest part of this ent. Now that you know the theory, you need to know some exercises to learn the different types of Fry screams I've mentioned. Sadly, there's no one size fits all exercise that gets everyone to use their vocal cords in the way they need to. But I've put together some of the ones that work the best for most people, and you can get that by clicking the link under the video to get it for free. It'll also go over a bigger overview of how screams are performed. And if you want a more tailored approach, it'll show you how to get in contact with me.
