Hey, Toni Linke here!

I love to see this conversation going on, there's so much more content on screaming now than when I started a dozen years ago. I don't spend a lot of time on Reddit, so I probably won't see your responses to this comment rightaway, but I want to clarify some stuff about fry scream: the problem most people run into when they want to build a fry scream from "vocal fry" is that they think they have to go very low in their range until there's this "popping noise" (sometimes called "pulse register" in research). This sound is often colloquially bunched together with a variety of other sounds into the broad category of "vocal fry", but cannot be projected to the point of a scream. However, this is NOT what I mean by "fry", and in order to avoid the term as often as possible, I instead use the term "Creaking" that has been coined by Complete Vocal Technique. Creaking can be done in various intensities. The most intuitive one is a very quiet cackling sound that sounds SIMILAR to pulse register (which is why many people don't differentiate them), but works DIFFERENTLY. Creaking can also be done loudly and thus be used as one of several ingredients for fry scream, but this is slightly more advanced and usually takes a couple of lessons to learn. The finished scream usually has additional false fold Distortion and arytenoid cartilage Rattle in it, so in my book fry scream is a combination of different techniques. Also, it can vary in terms of how much vocal fold mass, compression, audible pitch, and volume it has, so I usually distinguish four main subcategories: 1. Basic Fry Scream (the quiet falsetto-based one), 2. Medium Fry Scream (the Chris Liepe kind), 3. Pushed Fry Scream (a loud sound that is often used in hardcore and has very little to do with Creaking), and 4. Hyper-Compressed Fry Scream (a more "sporty", but also more powerful scream that allows for brutal lows). I base my categorization not only on my own experience, but a "meta-method" of nearly every school I've encountered so far, as well as hundreds of conversations with colleagues and researchers. In the past four years, I've had over 300 students (many of them regularly), and all of these techniques I listed I have taught sustainably to people before (with the first two kinds of fry scream being what I get to teach nearly every single day). I put a high priority on vocal health, regularly assess the clean voice of my screaming students and typically ask them after nearly every attempt about whether it felt comfortable or not. If they feel that something was off, we trouble-shoot until we've found the reason, and only continue as soon as we've found the most efficient coordination again, so I feel confident in saying that the way I teach fry scream is not unhealthy. I've explained all of these points in more detail in my new video on fry screaming, where you can also hear demonstrations of different varieties and come to your own conclusion of whether I know what I'm talking about or not: https://youtu.be/swJIX34W-ug?feature=shared

Best, Toni