Power metal can be a challenging genre for vocalists. With all the high registers they have to hit and whatnot. For ex-Kamelot singer Roy Khan, after years of singing, he’s revealed that he can no longer perform some of his biggest songs the way he used to.
In an October 2026 interview with El Cuartel Del Metal, Khan—who is currently singing with Conception—discussed his “The Black Halo And Beyond” tour. The trek, which traverses Latin America, finds Khan performing tracks from Kamelot’s iconic The Black Halo album, along with other songs from his storied career.
Former Kamelot vocalist Roy Khan admits that it’s hard for him to still sing the way he did as a younger performer
During the conversation, Khan admitted that some of his songs are much more challenging to perform these days. “You can’t really hear it,” he said, as transcribed by Blabbermouth. “What we do with the songs is we take some of them down one or two half steps, depending on how tricky they are for me to sing these days. And then it’s like being back when my voice, my register, was a little bit higher.”
“So, that’s how we deal with it,” he continued. “You have drop-tune pedals now that you can use on bass and guitars, and that’s how it works. So a lot of the songs are not in the same key as back in the day. Which before was a problem because you couldn’t really tune guitars and bass, let’s say 20 years ago, in a way that wouldn’t mud up the sound and make things sound ugly. But nowadays, the technology is so good that you can do that. Which is a big help. Otherwise, I would have had to structure the lines a little bit differently from what I used to do it.”
Roy Khan is currently playing Latin America on a legacy tour of his older Kamelot material
Khan eventually weighed in on how his changing voice has impacted how he crafts new music. “I always like to push myself to the edge of what I can do on records,” he said. “On albums, I kind of like being on the edge of what I can do. And I haven’t really gone for the really, really high stuff since way back with Conception.”
“On Flow [1997], for example, the last album we did in the ’90s, there were no like really super-high vocals. So that ended with ‘In Your Multitude’ [1995] way back,” he recalled. “So, I don’t really feel that I think any differently from what I did back then. I just naturally came to the conclusion that my voice sounded better in a slightly lower range.
Khan finally added, “Of course, there’s a lot of people that will wanna hear me do the really high stuff still, which I can do, but I don’t have that… It’s more airy, it’s more falsetto-like than what it was on the very first Conception records.”
Photo by Steve Thorne/Redferns
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