Over the years, we have students asking “How do I get a rock, raspy voice like Jimmy Barnes?”
Below is the transcript of an interview between Jimmy and Andrew Denton, explaining how he sounds the way he does.
JIMMY BARNES: Um, you know, I've got a unique instrument. You wouldn't know from now because, literally, I've got the worst flu, but it's very,very rare I lose my voice. I remember a couple of years back, I was doing some TV show like 'Hey Hey It's Saturday', and they had some vocal teacher out from America. This famous vocal teacher who'd taught all sorts of people, and she came in, and I was warming up. And my warm-up is, “sort of peels the paint off walls”, and she burst into my dressing room and said,
"That's how a rock'n'roll singer should warm up."
And so, like, I thought, "Maybe I'm doing the right thing after all."
I'd lost my voice one time, a long, long time ago, with the flu. And it was a big show I had to cancel, so we had to go for insurance. And they put an optical fibre camera down the back of my nose and had me singing and talking. And they said to me, that when I sing, I don't use my vocal cords. You have your two main vocal cords like this, and then around them you have these false cords. And apparently,when I sing, this guy said I was one of about half a dozen people he's ever seen in the world, who have taught themselves to sing like this. And so I get to the point where I can't speak because I use my vocal cords to speak, but I can still sing. So, um, you know, I just don't lose my voice. It's like a... My voice is like a Mack truck. It's hard to start and then you can't stop it!
You can see the full interview on Jimmy Barnes and Andrew Denton (This part of the interview is from 27 minutes).
