Jon`s voice is still powerfull today?

It's true tho aint it? That a singer has to maintain/train his voice. Otherwise his/her career will slowly come to an end. I too have noticed the increasing amount of nasal singing from Jon which I dont like - and when you're a dedicated singer, one of the last things you'll start doing is start smoking. It's pure logic.

But Jon decides what to do with his voice. Im just saying that I have much more respect for singers like James LaBrie who works so hard maintaining his great singing voice.

I think it's the combination of the countless gigs they've done over the years AND smoking.
Smoking does serious shit damage to your voice...and some damage can be permanent. Vocal chords swell when you smoke, which makes the voice’s pitch or frequency drop.

http://www.voice-lessons.com/faq.htm#SMOKING
Remember that whatever you breathe moves directly through the vocal folds and affects them accordingly. Smoke of any kind is hot and toxic. It causes burning, drying and irritation which in turn causes the vocal folds to swell making a good singing tone difficult at first and over time impossible for the habitual smoker. Young peoples' bodies seem to be resilient and thus young singers who smoke may not notice any ill effects, so they may think that smoking isn't doing them or their voice any harm. What they don't understand is that the damage that is being done to the vocal folds and the breathing mechanism is cumulative and often cannot be reversed once they notice problems singing. My advice is to find a way to quit smoking immediately, and if you don't smoke PLEASE DON'T START.

I remember, back a long time ago, when I was a member of the FC, I replied to a post about Jon's voice and his smoking...it's a wonder I'm alive today to reply to this post.

S.

I love Jon's vocals, he inspired me to become the best singer I can become many years ago, and I still work at it every single day. My favourite album as far as singing is conserned is Keep the faith.

His voice has lost power yes, he´s still good though.
I´ve studied singing (particularly rock singing) and performed live for 10 years now, and from my point of view, there are two distinct challenges with Jon´s vocals today.

1. The amount of energy used to hit the high notes, it costs a lot to get it right.

2. The direction of the energy. Once you have the proper energy needed for a given note, you need to direct it in a certain way.

Something happened between Destination anywhere and Crush, my guess is Jon didn´t sing that much in between + that the smoking MIGHT (and only might) have caused him to alter his technique to a certain degree. If you don´t practice powerful high notes you usually loose the sense for how much it actually takes to hit them. It´s all about muscular memory, particularly when moving into the more extreme areas of the voice. I´ve seen singers take 1/2 a year of without any live singing (just acoustic stuff and fooling around, usually the belting stuff is left out on these occasions) and come back sounding like teenage girls on the high notes. It usually is fixed with a couple of weeks of very dedicated muscular conditioning and constantly working on the high notes to return.

During crush and bounce he was often using to little energy to get the powerful notes, and that´s the main reason he was adding the "nasal" sound to it, singers call it twang. It is actually produced in the vocal tract but makes the sound nasal, the main point is that when twanging you don´t need nearly as much energy to hit notes as you would otherwise.

He has gotten better again, because he seems to be finding his way back to the right amounts of energy to hit powerful notes.
The problem now has become category 2, directing the energy. He´s in my view doing enough now, but he is not directing it as precisely as he used to before the problems occured in the late 90´s. This becomes very clear on the clip of Hallelujah they recently recorded, a lot of energy but it sounds very strained all through even though the notes are fairly low on the scale. This is because he´s trying to push the notes higher, he has some tensions that prevents him from letting the note sing freely. Basically, I would call it overblowing, to much air pressure beneath the cords which means they can´t stretch freely.

As far as touring, it doesn´t wear a singer down in the sense one might think. The vocal cords are not muscles, just tissue that vibrate. And the human body is very good at repairing itself. The only thing that could happen is that you get nodes, which would cause a blind spot in the voice on certain notes. That´s probably not what happened to Jon, since he still hits lots of high notes on studio recordings and so on. Those would not be possible if he had had a severe problem with nodes (good example of node problems is Bonnie Tyler before and after her surgery..)

The age thing shouldn´t be an issue either, because it comes down to energy. And the man is in stellar shape, no doubt about it. With the muscular conditioning he has, there is no risk of not having the physical power to pull it off. It has everything to do with using the power and directing it.

To sing like Jon did in the eighties and early nineties is however not something that can be manufactured, to belt like that with rasp requires that you really feel it, otherwise the energy just won´t be there.
Sometimes on more recent performances it looks like he´s thinking "Oh shit here comes the high note" instead of feeling the song and the lyrics. It´s a mental game as well, and that´s the prescription of activating a lot of unnecessary muscles, i.e. tension, which means that the energy is going to be directed in a less efficient manner.

My guess is the basic technical issue, + the fact that he probably deep down doesn´t want to express himself like he used to with all the screaming and the rasp and so on is the issue.

I firmly believe that he still could perform like he did in the these days era (he had great technique back then), if he got the issues straightened out and had the desire to do it.

Wow what a post, I just couldn´t stop writing, I had obviously thought a lot about this but never really let it out before

Thank you Grandi for that excellent post. I know nothing about the technical side of all of this so it's nice to hear from an expert.

Have you watched the unplugged performances yet? I was impressed, for the most part, with Jon's vocals during that performance. Would you say he was doing anything majorly different during those performances or were they technically speaking similar to the problems you outlined above?

Great post there. Nice reading and I think you're spot on with your guesses

I agree, good to have someone on who knows what they're talking about. After all, the rest of us are just surmising from a layman's point of view.....

Hey, I agreed with Rane about something. Miracle...lol.

Haha...i'm sure theres tons of other things we agree with

I'm sure there is, otherwise we wouldn't both be here.

Actually guys, the CORRECT answer is that his voice got worse and worse from 2000-2003 in the Bounce/TLFR era, but since HAND it has been getting much much better, and on Unplugged he saved a few songs from being ruined by Richie, as opposed to the other way around like usual. He murdered Prayer though. Ouch.

I love Jon's voice! It's soo amazing, it sends chills through me!! He's got that "thing" in his voice that is HOT