Friday, July 11, 2008

DVD Recommendation: The Zen of Screaming


One of the challenges every touring vocalist faces is in putting out a powerful performance every night without completely destroying your voice for subsequent shows. Especially if you do more 'extreme' vocals such as those in metal, punk, and harder-edged industrial, your risk of losing your voice is pretty high if you don't know what you're doing. Melissa Cross is a professional voice coach who specializes in working with these types of extreme vocalists and the exercises she details in both of the Zen of Screaming DVDs are aimed at warming up the voice in a way the allows performers to give harsh vocal performances night after night without completely destroying their voices.

There is a lot of good info in the videos, but you unfortunately have to sit through what seems like endless amounts of testimonials by Cross' famous clients about how great she is at what she does. Is this really necessary? I mean, assuming I bought the video, isn't it safe to assume that I trust that she knows what she's talking about? If you can deal with this, though, there really is a lot of valuable knowledge packed into these that would likely be useful to vocalists of any kind, not just the growlers and screamers.

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