Hello! Welcome to another blog post where we feature one of my awesome students – this week we’re going to meet Gon Pan and his band ‘Down In One’.
When Gon first got in touch to work on his voice, he explained he’d been in a lot of metal bands before, and had often done a lot of screaming duties in those bands. While Gon still loves that music and it’s a big influence on him, he was wanting to become more a singer and less of a screamer… and so we set to work.
A Songwriter’s Brain with Front-man’s Voice
Gon’s voice has gone from strength to strength, and he’s utilised it to great effect in his songwriting. We identified tendencies to strain to reach high notes when Gon was first in (fairly natural), and now we’ve managed to get him into his upper ranges with strength and intensity (you can listen below).
When I first heard Gon’s own material, it really reminded me lyrically of really complex stories like those woven by Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder from the early 90s Grunge movement. For those who don’t know, I am a HUGE fan of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, and I love the dark brooding textures and complex, ambiguous yarns that each song spins, so my ear was very much captured by what Gon was doing.
The band goes down like a malt whisky…
I spoke with Gon recently about his new band, and he filled me in.
“The band is called Down In One, if I had to describe us in one line it’d be “whisky fuelled, heavy-*******-metal”. Our lineup is me on vocals, Jonny on guitar, Rich on bass and Jimmy on drums. Our main influences are bands like Motley Crue, Pantera, Black Label Society, Metallica and Black Sabbath.
We’ve just released our 4-song EP, and you can get it right here!”
When you have a listen, you’ll hear EXACTLY what they mean. The guitars are definitely in the realm of Pantera, Motley Crue and Metallica, and the vocals are very much reminiscent of Metallica (and I definitely hear Vedder and Cornell in there, but that might just be me!).
Whether you love clean vocals, dirty vocals, rock or metal, you will LOVE the whisky-infused grit of Gon’s vocals with stonkingly catchy guitar riffs (I’m a big fan of Golden Ashes – track 3 – really dark and brooding, and lets low gain guitar and melancholic melodies take over), you NEED to have a listen to this.