My voice goes deeper than most men and higher than most women. I’ve been searching a bit for some software that would tell me what my range was but haven’t popped up with anything. I did find a really neat graph on Wikipedia for vocal and instrument pitch ranges and am now really interested to see where I fit in on that. Any ideas or leads?
Whoa! And while you’re looking at that check out the article on “Castrato”.
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
assuming you can hear pitch, just get yourself down to the nearest piano and see how much of it you can scale. Note that many people can do very high or low notes, but they just dont (or have no need) to sing with them. Thus your talent may be quite common. However, there are also a lot of people (e.g. my wife) who cant do any low notes, I theorize that is because she tenses her vocal chords and throat when trying to do low notes, rather than relaxing (e.g. like gargling).
I too have a very wide range, but I would actually trade it for a better controlled smaller range. Sometimes I am not even sure what register I am starting in when I first open my mouth! It drives my singing teacher nuts.
You might already know this, but don’t just keep playing a scale up and up until you can’t sing any higher. Do a five note scale (do re mi fa so) and then repeat it a half-step higher, and then higher again, etc. To find the bottom of your range, use so fa mi re do, and move down a half step each time.
Or, just sing a song with a high note in it, in a higher and higher key. Sometimes it’s easier to do an actual song.
TJDude825:
Or, for really good approach technique to get your highest notes, start in mid-scale (the “sol” note) and come down, then go up the full scale —
sol, sol, sol, sol, sol fa mi re do (turn around go back up) re me fa sol la ti do (hold top note for about three beats, increase volume to good strong forte if it feels comfortable to do it) then gliss-slide down the octave to the bottom “do” of the scale.
•do ---
•ti - .
•la - .
•sol - - - - - - .
•fa - - .
•me - - .
•re - - .
•do - -
Then repeat a half-step up and so on.
I just tested this, and my range goes from the C below the bottom E string of a guitar, to the C above the top E string. That’s three octaves. I think that might be a pretty big range - is it?
That’s pretty big. They always told us in choir that an avergae person with any formal vocal training at all has a 2-octave range or so. Supposedly Whitney Houston has 4 octaves, which is enormous.
Male countertenors (falsettists, male altos, what have you) often have a range extending from the low notes of a typical baritone or bass to the high notes of a typical mezzo-soprano, which is about four octaves’ worth.
If you’re just interested in knowing the extent of your vocal range—which are the lowest and highest notes you can hit?—then as already noted, you just need to test yourself against a piano or pitch tester or something.
If, on the other hand, you’re trying to find out your vocal type—are you a soprano, alto, tenor, bass, baritone, mezzo-soprano, or what?—then it’s more complicated. If you’ve never had any vocal training, you will probably have to spend some time singing for an experienced voice teacher or choral director before s/he can judge which is the overall “best” part of your range for your voice. (Somewhat surprisingly, total range doesn’t differ that much for different voice types: mezzos are technically supposed to be able to vocalize the same range as sopranos, and tenors the same range as basses, and there’s quite a lot of overlap between tenor and alto. What “vocal type” you are generally depends not so much on which notes you can manage to hit as on which notes you can sound good hitting.)
If you’re not including your falsetto range, that’s pretty big. If you are, that’s about normal.
I’ve got a range a smidge over two octaves in normal voice (about low E-flat to the A above middle C), but can get another octave or so in falsetto. That makes me a baritone by most reckonings.
I have about 2 and a half usable octaves, centered around the baritone range. This means that I can sing most of the bass range and most of the tenor.
[QUOTE=TJdude825]
You might already know this, but don’t just keep playing a scale up and up until you can’t sing any higher. Do a five note scale (do re mi fa so) and then repeat it a half-step higher, and then higher again, etc. To find the bottom of your range, use so fa mi re do, and move down a half step each time.
QUOTE]
I am not sure I understand this. Both results should be about the same? they are for me unless I misunderstood something
scm1001, I think what TJDude825 was saying was don’t do this:
do
ti
la
sol
fa *<ack!>
me -
re -
do -
ti -
la -
sol -
fa -
me -
re -
do-
…do this instead:
do
ti
la
sol
fa
me
re
do - etc
ti - -
la - - -
sol - - - -
fa - - - -
me - - -
re - -
do-
(except that you raise each iteration by a half-step, something that can’t easily be represented in “do re me” terms, so this is a mild oversimplification)
See also my countersuggestion above, a warmup that our choir teacher ran us through before rehearsals. (I only mapped one iteration, you repeat it a half-step higher each time, just like the 5-note ascending scale charted above) Here’s that sequence showing a second iteration:
•me
•re ---
•do --- - .
•ti - . - .
•la - . ----- - .
•sol - - - - - - . - - .
•fa - - . - - .
•me - - . - - .
•re - - . - -
•do - -
I have occasionally deigned to call myself a musician, and find this thread most interesting. But despite Whitney Houston’s, Mariah Carey’s, or Bobby McFerrin’s range, the most amazing thing of all is how Ahunter3 figures out how to use all these codes and whatever. SDMB - ya gotta love this place. xo C.
Not only what sounds good but also what tessitura (roughly, the part of the range most frequently sung) allows you to sing with the least amount of fatigue. Mind you, if you are a young tenor or soprano the high notes may cause fatigue until you learn how to sing them properly. But a healthy, well-trained soprano will most likely find the lower mezzo tessitura to be more tiring than singing higher, whereas the mezzo will find the higher soprano tessitura tiring even if she has an upper extension to her range that allows her to occasionally pop up higher than the soprano. Rossini mezzos often sing pretty high but don’t stay there for long. Sopranos and tenors often hang around at the top of the staff (G clef) for a long time – particularly when singing stuff like Richard Strauss or some Mozart (like “Dies Bildniss ist bezaubernd schön” which kills off tenors with regularity).
As for exercises to reach high notes, try this one too:
do
ti
la
sol
fa
me
re
do - - -------
ti
la
sol - - - - - -
fa
me - - - - - -
re
do- - - ----
Essentially, sing the pitches do, mi, sol, do, sol, mi, do several times fast on a nice easy vowel (usually “ah”). On the last one try to hold the high note before descending. Then repeat the whole thing a semitone higher. The reason to sing the first arpeggios fast is to avoid thinking too much about the high note you’re aiming at, so you don’t try to “prepare” it – which is what often causes a singer to go “ack!” on a high note. Don’t worry if your pitch accuracy sucks to begin with. The idea is to free up your voice and not to over think the process. Let me repeat that: don’t think too much.
My only authority for this trick is that my teacher taught it, it works for me, and now I have both of the Queen of the Night arias in my repertoire (which is to say I perform the high F in public, not just in the safety of the practice room) after gradually moving up from second alto, through mezzo-soprano to soprano to the stratosphere. Yet I can also still sing Fiordiligi from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte which has a number of low As and at least one low G-sharp. This means I have almost 3 octaves that I use in public, and more than that when I’m just messing around (especially after a few drinks). Learning to sing low can be, IMO, harder than to sing high. YMMV. I don’t have much good advice for extending the range downward, except to say “relax”. Try low notes first thing in the morning before you get too stressed during the day (seriously, it works).
Yes! Thanks to AHunter3 for creating the charts and for the “quote” function that helped me steal his great idea for my post.
::bows::
Is there no way that I can have the computer record my voice and tell me the frequencies or however that is measured? Let’s assume I am tone deaf and can’t do the do-re-mi etc…
Sure there is. Download one of those freeware or shareware guitar-tuner applications and in amongst them you should find some that display the ambient sound (that would be you, humming or singing) as a frequency and assign it a note (C#, C, B, etc).
If you can only find displays for frequency you’ll need a conversion chart (e.g., 440 Hz
bloody hell, I didn’t hit Submit!
…440 Hz = middle A, etc).
sort of. check out the shareware on this page Vocal Software | Vocalist. There might be something useful. However I have yet to find anything accurate that will give me more than just a relative (e.g. you are singing an A, but no idea what octave) or a mess (e.g. a fourier transform of your voice)