I am a poor singer with hardly any range. The two songs I have to sing Semi-regularly are “Happy Birthday” and the national anthem. Both require me to shift keys to keep my voice from cracking.
“Happy Birthday” is easy compared to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with its huge range. I don’t know if I could even manage to sing the latter, what with my fairly small range, and I went to music school and learned to sing.
What I would expect from a mediocre singer (or a better singer trying to sing Happy Birthday in a key that’s too high to cope with the high notes) is to either splatter on the high notes or falsetto them or just plain miss them entirely, but either way to continue onward, in the same key.
That’s not what I’m hearing people do.
As previously stated, most people don’t know what a key is nor do they know whether they are in it.
Neither do they care
It’s Happy Birthday, not an audition.
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Is the “Star Spangled Banner”'s range really considered “huge”? I know it’s difficult for many people, but it’s only four more scale notes than “Happy Birthday.” What is the average person’s range, anyway?
I’m a musician, and the off-pitch singing doesn’t bother me a bit. Most people can’t sing. So what?
What DOES bug me is that Happy Birthday usually seems to be sung way too slowly. It’s supposed to be happy, a celebration. Not a dirge. You don’t have to be a musician to put a little pep into it.
C’mon! He’s not dead! (yet) It’s his birthday!
Remember Roseanne’s rendition? That’s an average range.
What was that about liquor bottles?
I vaguely remember it, or the story about it, but I’ve obviously put it so far out of my mind that I’m going to resist the temptation of looking it up and listening to it again, lest it bring back traumatic memories.
Do you remember the Do-Re-Mi song from Sound of Music? When you sing “birthday” the first time, you go from So to Do and the second time from So to Re. That So to Re jump is known as a fifth.
Imagine a keyboard. If you are on C and hop to C# which is the black key, you’ve moved one semitone and if you play both keys at the same time, you play a minor 2nd interval. Move to D and you’ve moved 2 semitones, or 1 tone, and the C and D together make a major 2nd interval, and so on. C and G are seven semitones apart and their chord is known as a fifth because that’s the way the interval ordering works out.
This page has a list of some useful reference songs to help understand what particular intervals sound like.
Curious … any bass/guitar players out there who were taught a reference song other than “Here Comes the Bride” when you were first learning to tune (assuming standard tuning)?
OK. I read what you wrote, but by the end I was thinking about other things because I just have zero interest.
Changing spark plugs can be a simple chore, but if I explain how to go about it to my girlfriend, I can see her eyes glazing over before I’ve mentioned feeler gauges.
Good for you?
For future reference, an easier way to express your lack of interest is to not bother reading the thread, otherwise you may accidentally learn something.
When you’re teaching kids how to sing Happy Birthday, you don’t start off by teaching them what a fifth is. You sing it to them: la, la, la… and they emulate it back at you.
I described things in terms of fifths and octaves because we’re not in an environment conducive to me going la la la at you. But your lack of theory familiarity with fifths and whatnot (or the lack of such familiarity on the part of singers I’m complaining about in this thread) have nothing to do with why people can’t sing the damn song.
Thanks. That’s helpful. I can listen to a recording of Do-Re-Mi and find out what that a fifth is.
But the problem is that if you asked me to sing the song, I know that each line is a little bit higher than the one before it. But no two times when I sang the song would I hit the same set of pitches.
I assume that C, D, and G have something to do with All Cars Eat Grass or Every Good Boy Does Fine. They made us incessantly repeat that throughout grade school but never explained to us why. Is that the order the piano keys are in?
Those are mnemonics for memorizing the layout of the bass and treble clef on written sheet music. I’ll expound later if someone doesn’t get to it first.
So, anyhow, “Every Good Boy Does Fine” is supposed to help you memorize what notes the lines on a treble clef represent, going from the bottom line to the top line: E, G, B, D, F. “All Cars Eat Grass” presumably represent the spaces between lines on a bass clef, going from the bottom up. (I say presumably because I’ve never heard this mnemonic before.) A, C, E, G.
I have had NO musical education. I really wish I had, or knew where/how to start. Other than knowing that the words used are related to music, all the informative posts here are completely meaningless. Completely. Like, I know there are keys (A, B, etc) but I have absolutely no idea what they are/sound like or how they’re different from each other. I know that apparently they can be major/minor or sharp/flat, but what those actually mean (or sound like), I have no clue.
I’m a bit surprised by your attitude in this thread, AHunter. You usually strike me as a rather thoughtful and caring poster, but your posts here come off really judgmental and … snotty. 
Amazing Grace 
I apologize. Somehow this thread seems to be coming off as dismissive of people who don’t have formal music training and that’s not at all what I was driving at. See post# 54.
I suppose I really am being snotty towards people who just plain can’t hear the difference between right and wrong, but it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with knowing keys and intervals and so on. It’s more like rolling one’s eyes at someone who wears garishly clashing color combinations or uses ketchup instead of marinara sauce on their pasta — I have a hard time believing so many people’s ears can be that bad, and I was literally accusing them of singing it bad on purpose, as if they’re embarrassed to sing it correctly or something.
Not sure I’m improving my standing here…