Put your hand on your abdomen and hum with your mouth closed. Gradually increase the volume. Feel how your abs are shrinking towards the inside? This means that your diaphragm is relaxing and pushing air out. That’s where the sound should be coming from.
Try letting a little air out. It should rattle a little at the back of your throat, without really having to make much sound at all. Rattling is a sign that you’ve got the right shape.
Draw out the growl for a few seconds and let it trail off. Practice bringing the volume up and down, and changing the pitch slightly. It’ll take a little practice. Keep your hand on your stomach to make sure you’re breathing as deeply as possible, and pushing the air from deep in your diaphragm.
Yo We Ah Ra
To inhale, expand your abdomen and lower back ribs, while not moving the chest and shoulders. Practice breathing from deep in your stomach, not from your throat, to make your growl as deep as possible.
Increase the volume and force gradually to get a sense of how much you need to breathe in to get the kind of sound and pitch you’re looking for. Play around with it for a while until it feels comfortable to you.
Go Ra Die
Write out some lyrics and practice singing half in an exhaled growl and half inhaled. Try out some Opeth[6] X Research source for practice: (Exhaled) “We enter winter once again” / (Inhaled) “Naked freezing from my breath. "
Drink warm tea with honey to help warm up your throat. Avoid drinking things like soda and milk, which can make your throat kind of mucous-coated, making it hard to sing. Don’t smoke. Lots of inexperienced singers think a couple cigarettes is the fast-track to a rough voice. It’s really the fast-track to addiction and disease. The proper form will work a lot better.
Don’t try to make it sound just like the original singer. Everyone’s growl is different. If your’s is lower or higher, that’s not a bad thing. Embrace your unique voice. If you don’t want to ape someone else’s song, pick a passage from a book you’re reading, or some old English poetry that rhymes and might sound cool death metal style. It’s just practice. Write your own metal lyrics, if you want to work with something original. Good themes always include death, demons, dragons, snakes, winter, bitterness, and darkness. Go for it.
Intense growling shouldn’t hurt. If it does, revise your technique and make sure you’re breathing from your diaphragm. When you start out growling, you use muscles that you never used before at such a strong level. If the muscles around your neck or throat are tired, stop growling until its over and start again.
If you pick up on growling after a long break, take it easy, as your stamina will be much worse. Though, you will redevelop much faster than the first time.
It doesn’t need to be fancy, or along with a musical track. Just use your phone and see how it sounds, or open up a GarageBand file or an Audacity file and sing along to a song you like to get a better sense.
If it hurts badly in the beginning though, stop and revise your technique. Maybe you’re pushing too much.
