How to Sing with Grit

In this post I’m going to go through some exercises to get you to sing with grit, where grit comes into the singing lexicon and tell you the difference between screaming and singing with grit. I hope you enjoy!

What Is Singing with Grit?

It’s generally used in rock culture. You’ll often find it with Rock bands such as Alice in Chains, Guns N’ Roses, Marilyn Manson, and many others. Essentially, it’s like singing through sandpaper. What you are trying to do is create the illusion of shouting and scratching but in fact you aren’t.

This is a very important difference.

If you just shout you will end up hurting yourself. However, if you are singing with grit you aren’t. It’s really important to know that whilst you may want to sing with grit, it is a pretty advanced singing technique and if you haven’t got the basics covered you will just end up hurting yourself. Not good for you or your voice!

How Hard Is It to Sing with Grit?

As I have just written, singing with grit isn’t the easiest thing to do in the world. Whilst it most definitely isn’t impossible, it’s not easy. What you need to be able to do before attempting it is to really get singing from your stomach and supporting your voice. Even though these aren’t phrases I particularly like using, breathe support is essential here. As well as this, you have to know how to aim your voice through the front of your mouth as well perfectly cleanly. This means that you aren’t using your nasal cavity or your throat. There needs to be zero pressure there before even attempting to sing with grit. If there is, it’s not going to be a huge amount different to screaming and as we know, you can’t scream without losing your voice. So that’s how hard it is to sing with grit.

Simply put

My humble opinion though is that you should try to avoid singing with grit. I personally don’t really like the way it sounds and even those who can do it properly with correct technique, often go way over the top and end up just screaming the lyrics. This is just a personal opinion though.

I won’t hold you back!

How to Sing with Grit

If you really want to sing with grit though, here are some exercises that will help you achieve your aim.

Just before the exercises a short introduction that you need to know:

As you are probably aware, the vocal tract is made up of many different parts. The main focus is always the vocal folds and being able to open and close them depending on what pitch you are singing at. In your full, chest voice, they are open fully and as you move up the scales, they should close up so that less of them will vibrate. For more information about this please check out that post.

Apart from the actual vocal cords though, there are other parts of the vocal tract which vibrate. It is your task to get them to vibrate and by doing so you will be able to sing with grit. This is actually done through breath control rather than singing on pitch. To control those other parts of the tract, you need to compress the air you are breathing out, almost like flexing your abdominal muscles and sort of ‘forcing’ the air out. This causes the flapping bits in your vocal tract to flap which is what is the gritty sound that you are after.

This is the basic understanding of how to sing with grit.

Now, here come the steps to actually put it into practice:

1. Make sure you are fully warmed up. This is really important here because we are going to play with fire a bit and I don’t want you to get burned.
2. Keep your chest, neck, and shoulders nice and relaxed. There will be some stress being put on your body in this technique, but you want it to be done in a clean way without involving too many other moving parts. The less we put under stress, the better. If you are stressed in these areas, then you will not be able to breathe properly and it’s really important that you do so here.
3. Ensure that your tummy is moving in and out and not your chest. You have to use belly breaths here. This gives you the support that you need in order to get that tone that you want.
4. Start singing in your chest voice in the cleanest possible way. It doesn’t matter what note you are singing; it just has to be a good one. I want you to start with just one note and no more. Hold that note for a good amount of time. At least five seconds.
5. Check that the note is coming out from the correct place, ensure it’s floating on top of your tongue. Put your fingers on your nose and close and open your nose to ensure that none of the sound is coming from there.
6. Once you have done all of this and are confident that you are singing correctly start to clench your abdominal muscles and add something called glottal compression. What you are doing here is enabling the flappy bits of the vocal tract to vibrate and disrupt the clear flow of air through it. You can imagine that you have a perfectly aimed note and now you are adding some white, static noise on top. For those of you who are old enough to remember, it is like searching for a radio station and not getting it quite right so you here the programme, but you can’t hear it clearly.

This step takes a long time to get used to. At first it may feel that there is someone scratching your throat. This is normal but it is important that you stop often and check whether you are losing your voice.

It’s very easy to get this wrong and if you get it wrong, you’ll know about it very quickly. Therefore, just keep an eye on yourself. Once you have tried singing one phrase or line with grit, pause, breathe, and speak again.

Then sing a normal note again. If there is anything not quite right, then please please stop trying to sing with grit that way. It is clearly wrong.

There is a lot of trial and error when it comes to singing with grit. Some of my students respond better to imagining that there is white noise coming out of their mouths and others must prefer to imagine that they are forcing their vocal tract to flap.

What they both have in common though is that they are using visualisation to get the note they want. This is the most important thing in this method. The power of the mind really lets you get to where you want to get to in the best possible way.

What’s the Difference between Singing with Grit and Screaming?

The difference should be pretty clear by now. When you sing with grit, you are singing correctly, just compressing your breathing so that a more throaty, gritty sound comes out. However, when you are screaming, it is uncontrolled, and you won’t be able to do it for very long. In truth though, singing with grit doesn’t hurt. Screaming does.

That’s the long and short of it.

In Closing

Singing with grit is difficult. There is no getting away from it. And if you want to do it properly, you’ll need to train and practice. The first thing you have to do it really the basics right. Once you have mastered that you can try and add some compression to give yourself that grit sound that you are after. I hope you have enjoyed this post and look forward to helping you on your journey to the best singer you can be. If you have any comments, let me know below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Till next time!