In this digital world of plastic lives and merchantilized existences, it’s such a rare thing to hear someone praising a musical genre and a band. Well, we metalheads are used to that. That’s why we can call our idols heroes because most fight for a cause, and the cause is HEAVY METAL. What an irony it is when the outcast has to remind the virtuoso what the word honor means…
Trivium’s Matt Heafy talked to Full Metal Jacket magazine about his life with Trivium. See what he has to say:
“It was great. I feel like it was a lot about the discipline of how my parents functioned. My dad is a marine, my mom is Japanese. I consider those two cultures to be very regimented and very disciplined and practiced.”
“Maybe as a kid I didn’t recognize that that’s where it was coming from. But I absolutely have instilled that. When I’m at home, I keep a pretty perfect schedule now.”
“And I am not talking about Twitch, but Twitch has become a big part of my life, where my life is kind of being displayed on it. So it hasn’t really changed but it’s made these practices even more regimented, which is great.”
“So 9 to 11 is my first stream. My second stream is 3 ’till 7. And the 9 to 11, the first thing I do is my hour of warm-up. The same one I do on tour, I do at home. It’s 30 minutes of head voice exercises, guitar and vocal at the same time, 20 minutes of head voice, Trivium stuff that I have the subscribers pick, and then 10 minutes of full voice.”
“Head voice is what everyone calls falsetto. Falsetto isn’t really head voice unless it’s super airy and light. But that King Diamond, Adam Levine, Rob Halford, that high pitch Bee Gees kind of thing – that’s head voice. You’ll see Matt [M. Shadows] from Avenged [Sevenfold] talk about that a lot.”
“So it’s 50 minutes of that, and then at 3 is when I do the set. Or I do at least an hour or two hours of old Trivium music ahead of the show. So I think I normally kind of had this. I’ve always had this discipline, even when I first joined the band.”
“My first experience of music – I was 11 years old and I was really into pop, punk, and ska. I tried out for a band but they didn’t let me in because I wasn’t good. And that was a bum out. So what I did after that, I got into Metallica – and I spent however much amount of time it took to get as good as what I was hearing.”
“And a thing about that… I was inadvertently learning what hard work was. And I’ve always done that. So since being 12 years old, I’ve been in Trivium, it’s my first band, my first job, it’s all I’ve ever known. I’m really happy I do have this regimentation.”
“I don’t feel like everyone needs it, but I know I do. And I am a slow learner and I know the amount of time it takes me to put into something and be good at it. And that’s when I knew I had to re-learn to sing, I had to put in an absurd amount of time.”
“And I like to keep that certain amount of time. I still have more years of incorrect technique versus correct technique. So I just need to offset the hours… It sounds exhausting, but I actually am more relaxed the more intense the schedule or the more things that I’m doing.”
