Before George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher became the legendary Cannibal Corpse vocalist we know him as today, he was fronting bands like Corpsegrinder and Monstrosity. And before that, Fisher was simply learning how to be a vocalist in front of his stereo system at home.
In an interview with Chaoszine, Fisher talked about training his voice to put up with hours of abuse nightly on tour, saying that his initial approach was pretty black-and-white – "I basically just kept at it, I was not going to be stopped. I knew that you had to train your voice to to withstand a certain amount of punishment." Fisher also humorously touches on trying to emulate Bruce Dickinson initially, which didn't exactly go well.
"You can't be on stage singing for an hour, hour and a half every night, whether you're singing or not. And you have to train your voice to put up with that kind of abuse because it's not normal for that happen. Especially singing death metal. Oh, that's just, that's an assault on your vocal cords for sure. I just kept at it. I learned on my own.
"I mean, my teachers were the records. Chuck Schuldiner and Glen Benton, John Tardy, and Dave Vincent. Even just having some stuff before I was a teenager, like Udo and trying to sound like, like Bruce Dickinson, which I miserably failed at… Rob Halford, Ozzy, Tom Araya all these guys influenced me, Mille from Kreator. I just kept at it. I just was like, 'Look, it's gonna get better, it's gonna get better.'
"I knew all the lyrics, I could recite all the lyrics to 'Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.' It's all these songs. I only bring that one up because it's like, what, 15 minutes long or something, that's like the most epic song in metal by Iron Maiden. But I knew all the lyrics and my friends were like, 'Man, you know all the lyrics and you sing them in time?' Even if I'm not singing them like they do. I guess it started coming around in my head, this is what I want to do.
"And so I just kept at it. I just knew that if I kept trying to sell it that I would figure it out. And I just did. I didn't take any vocal lessons. Especially for extreme music, there was no vocal coach. My coaches were the records, my coaches were the people who sang on them."
