Low Notes: The Forbidden Realm In Rock Vocals
Why do you suppose it is that whenever somebody wants to talk about what impressive range a lead vocalist has, they almost unanimously praise the vocalists who can sing the highest notes i.e. , notes in the 5th and 6th octave, while they all but ignore the whole other side of the spectrum? There have been vocalists who sing extremely high notes with beautiful tone and it's a great thing, but so many others have sung high just for the sake of it and it's no more musical than a guitarist who thinks he's going to be praised as the next Eddie Van Halen or Yngwie Malmsteen without realizing that those musicians aren't unique because they could play fast just for the sake of speed. Those players became legends because they were unique and because they could play with great touch, tone and feel. They had impeccable intonation. Their vibrato was a thing of beauty....and yes, they could play as fast as they wanted to, but they were at their most exciting when they used speed in moderation. To place speed as a goal first and foremost and think that if you just run scales and play mindless repeating licks with no melody, that's nothing more than a fast way to get nowhere. The vocal equivalent is to squeeze out the highest notes a vocalist can possibly muster, at the expense of being screechy. It amounts to valuing quantity over quality. Without great tone, does it really matter if you can sing a G5? Axl Rose still sings high notes, but do they sound good to you? I'd rather hear him take his lines down an octave and sing them in chest than to hear him use that Mickey Mouse tone. Robert Plant did his best to sing the highest notes he could possibly crank out and guess what? At the ripe old age of 32, Robert Plant's career as a hard rock lead vocalist was over. His doctors told him that if he continued to scream out notes the way he had been, before much longer, his larynx would be reduced to rubble. Suddenly, singing a softer, lighter type of rock seemed appealing to him.