Lord_Of_Diamonds wrote:
Two things: 1, professional singing teachers who work at academic institutions or conservatories are probably not likely to give you advice on things they can't prove are safe or don't have a history of research behind them. It's why no accredited pedagogical institution has, say, a contemporary pop singing course of study or a metal scream course of study, because those styles of singing are known to not be kind to the voice and prior research suggests that they are inherently damaging. Nobody wants to be responsible for teaching that to people and having it be damaging, unless they think it's not damaging somehow or haven't gone through a course of study for it. I actually did some research on throat singing for a paper I wrote for a community college class last year and there's a similar atmosphere around it. 2, the people who throat singing is endemic to often consider it to be really culturally important and unique to them, to the point where they believe that no one else can properly perform it. It's a long shot but maybe that's why you seem to have trouble finding people who want to teach it?
I’m obviously not referring to teachers at traditional conservatories, the curriculum there is geared towards a very specific style.
Just to give an example, I’d say that Berklee’s program for MT, or EMPA’s popular singing career fit the category of contemporary popular singing in accredited
institutions.
The kind of throat singing OP’s referring to is produced
in the same way sub-harmonic singing is, by combining vocal fry with regular phonation. Both techniques dutifully investigated in how to produce healthily. Neither which OP knows how to do, so he’d be better off focusing on getting down the basics first.
If you’re interested into reading research into this kind of techniques (everything from sovt to fry and screaming), check out Guzmán’s papers:
here’s a list.
“In a study aimed to assess a group of metal singers who engage in growl voice and/or reinforced falsetto, Guzman et al12 found that these techniques do not seem to contribute to laryngeal disorders. Perceptual, acoustic, functional, and laryngoscopic assessment showed no major alterations in most of the participants. Moreover, no significant differences in voice and laryngeal evaluation were found when comparing these metal singers with other CCM singers who do not use neither growl voice nor reinforced falsetto.12 Recently, in a study conducted to multidimensionally investigate common vocal effects in experienced professional CCM singers, laryngeal structures of all singers were found to be healthy in spite of using vocal effects such as growl voice and vocal distortion over many years.5”
There are more resources by other authors, but not in English (mostly ES, IT); if you’re fluent in any other language and interested in reading more, lemme know and I’ll try to find them for ya.
Commisaur wrote:
Really? I spoke with several professional singing teachers who work at brick and mortar type music lesson businesses and they told me that they would be unable to help me. How would these teachers with no experience, or even familiarity in the style, get me to produce the sounds of Mongolian Throat Singing which entails producing two notes simultaneously by vibrating certain parts of your throat that one does not normally even use? I find it hard to image how they could help me
And no, I have not taken any singing lessons before. I've only made a few amateurish do-it-yourself attempts to throat sing and to do harsh metal vocals, all attempts which hurt my throat. It makes sense what you say about developing a foundation for healthy vocalizations, but I really want to learn this all from a throat singing specialist as well. I'm sure the foundation they would give me would be far more relevant and applicable than the foundation provided by teacher well versed in more Western/popular styles of singing
And lastly, even if I did acquire some proficiency with the basics of singing I doubt I would then be able to figure out how to Mongolian Throat Sing just from reading the WikiHow article or watching a YouTube video. I would still need help and guidance
You’re trying to learn an extended technique, you won’t get there if you don’t know how to handle your instrument first. To use the guitar as an analogy, it wouldn’t matter if you just want to learn how to sweep pick to shred like a mofo and nothing else, you don’t get there before learning how to strum your basic campfire chords.
The foundation is the same for everyone, you need to learn how to use your natural voice properly, regardless of what your final goal might be, and for that, any good teacher will be able to set you in a good path. Worry about the specifics once you get there.
And no, please don’t try to learn from online articles written by God-knows-whom.