Ok, I’ll admit it. I picked this sone for one main reason. This vocal is insane. Just plain nuts. It’s just about the hardest song you could even imagine and I gave it my best try. Shockingly, I didn’t come out that badly.
I’ve always been a big fan of Sebastian Bach and Skid Row. I think they did some amazing work. The band coming out of New Jersey with the aid of Jon Bon Jovi and Sebastian our of Canada formerly with the group Madam X - they made for an explosive mix, both on their records and on stage.
Back in those days, Bas was out of control, being as much of a lose canon as Axl Rose - only worse. He was loud abrasive, arrogant, cocky — everything you expect of a rock star. He’d take things too far, then go another few inches further. Like when he wore a T-shirt that said “Aids kill Fags dead.”
Obviously, too much. Clearly, going beyond the pale. He embarrassed the shit out of his band with that. Or when someone threw a bottle at him onstage he responded by throwing the broken fragment back into the audience. That scarred a poor girl who had nothing to do with it - then he jumped into the audience boots first to fight with the guy. Also, too much and that led to a pretty massive lawsuit. He wasn’t just pretending, he was living literally on the edge. Eventually, that got him kicked out of the band - permanently.
But he had an incredible voice. Here’s some analysis of what he was able to achieve vocally.
I used to be primarily a power singer. I used to just belt and blast my way into the upper register and that worked fine, but it couldn’t last. Over the course of 30-40 minutes I would be exhausted and burn out.
Later on, I was living in a house that had a faulty transforming just outside which slowly blew up all our appliances, it took out the refrigerated the dish washer and the power supply in my computer which left me breathing burning rubber for several weeks. That’s how a lost my power voice because trying to do it after that point left me coughing uncontrollably.
That’s when I eventually started to learn how to do blend voice. Normally, you have two basic vocal tracks you can use. The first is your speaking (chest) voice and the second is your false (falsette/head) voice which uses the vocal folds mostly at the back of your throat. This would be how Prince sang most of the time, using falsetto. What I learned in college vocal classes was that their was a third option, called “Blend Voice” which used aspects from both (chest and head voice) at the same time. What I didn’t know was how to access it.
In Sebastian’s case, his speaking voice is actually fairly high. This alone helps immensely because singing in blend voice depends on using the same technique as normal (chest) voice singing, but you have to develop a different set of vocal folds than you would with a low speaking voice. It’s like exercising a different set of muscles. (This is also another reason why Michael Jackson usually spoke with a high-voiced tone - this kept him using those muscles even if he was really doing it to deny that he ever reached puberty. For the record, he did.) This gives him a massive advantage.
Basically, blend voice is singing in head voice range, but shifting the tone forward from the back of your throat to the front - essentially aiming the sound to focus right behind your front teeth so the final sound is just like your chest voice, only higher.
You can then add distortion to it, but you don’t get that from the back of your throat the way I used to do with power singing. You manage that using “fry” within your mouth so it doesn’t cause strain on your vocal cords.
Doing this has allowed me to move into Robert Plant range, and to do songs by Lou Gramm in Foreigner - which I could never do before. It takes practice and I’m still working on gaining full control.
This song was a pretty aggressive attempt to push as far as I thought I could. It’s not perfect, but it came out pretty well.
Vyan
Cover song - Wasted Time (Originally by Skid Row)