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.

That's what enabled Robert Plant to have longevity. He ended up having to make that artistic compromise and if you asked him, he'd probably tell you that what he has sung since his Led Zeppelin days has been exactly what he wanted to, but when as a professional rock vocalist, your medical diagnosis presents you with only one option, you're gonna learn to love that option!

Plant was an awesome frontman. Led Zeppelin dominated the 70s like no heavy band has ever dominated a decade, but if Plant would have been able to sing hard rock music for a lot longer if he had taken better care of his voice and hadn't pushed himself beyond his limits always on one direction - upwards.

It's ironic. Led Zep was known for their understanding that you had to have what they called "light and shade", that you couldn't always be relentlessly heavy because variety is good! Yet Plant pretty much lived in mixed voice. How often did you hear him explore the low side of his range in Led Zeppelin? How many of his Zeppelin songs were sung in chest register?

It doesn't make sense does it? There are certain indisputable truths:

Moderation in all things is crucial.

You couldn't have loud if there were no such thing as quiet.

There is no high without low and what goes up must eventually go down. There are any number of rock legends who learned that the hard way and when I say that, I mean in all aspects of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. The 27 Club is proof that this is a hard learned lesson.

Despite all that, it's my contention that most rock vocalists (metal is a sub-genre of rock) tend to ignore one end of the sonic spectrum.

They want to stay high without ever having to come down. They'll show you how high they can sing, but few want to explore the other side of their range. There have been a few notable exceptions, such as Peter Steele of Type O Negative, but most fail to ever develop the low part of their range.

How does that make any sense? If your range is E2 to A5, you have a range of three octaves and fourth, but if you consistently ignore anything below A3, guess what? You have essentially cut your range down to two octaves. That you could sing lower does not matter if you never do.

Why would you put in the work to develop a three or four octave range and then only use half of it?

Can you imagine a rock guitarist deciding to not use the low E string or the A string because "people only care about high notes"? Keith Richards came the closest. He decided to not use the low E string so he took it off. That's great for the specific type of music he wanted to play, but he isn't known for writing heavy songs, is he?

Matter of fact, as rock guitarists have explored the limits of heaviness, they didn't add higher notes; they added lower notes. Tony Iommi tuned down to C# on the Master Of Reality album and the sound is monstrous!

More recently, quite a few guitarists have used guitars with one or even two extra low strings - yet no extra high strings! At some point they decided high enough was high enough, unless you wanted to write music that only dogs could hear.

The greatest rock guitarists use the entire range of the instrument. Men like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani use all their strings and they use all parts of the fretboard.

What they don't do is have a ten string guitar built and then only use five of the strings.

No. You use what you have and hopefully, you use it tastefully. Whether a note is tasteful or not isn't inherent in the pitch of the note; it comes down to how, where and when you use that note.

How long will it take rock vocalists to figure out what Iommi did in the early 70s? Dynamics matter! Your high notes only sound high if you contrast them with low notes. It is no more complicated than that: Dynamics and contrast are essential to giving your audience variety and variety is good.

Isn't it interesting how if you follow this advice and you sing dynamically by using what you have available to you that not only does it give your audience more variety, but when using one spectrum of your range, you're also giving the other spectrum of your range a rest? It's almost as if nature intended it, isn't it?

5 comments