Once you've found a comfortable place to sing in Cincinnati, you'll probably want to find ways to sing better. You'll quickly learn that certain tracks from certain artists work well for you while some of your listening favorites clearly do not. A little bit of very light music theory can help you understand why.
The opening act
The opening screen of karaoke tracks often advises that the song is being played in the key of C, or F or whatever. Great. So what does it mean?
Generally, the key of a song is the note that the rest of the harmony centers on. Ranging from a low of A to a high of G, that helpful advisory on the opening screen can give the singer a clue as to how high or low pitched the backup track will be played. Karaoke DJs can often help further by electronically raising or lowering the pitch of the track to better complement the vocal range of the singer.
Vocal range
Every singer’s voice has a natural, comfortable range of notes it can cover without strain. The key to good singing is learning to control the pitch of the notes within that range. As a singer launches a vocal, he needs to pick a starting place that allows him to go low enough to cover the lowest note in a song and high enough to hit the highest without straining.
Further notes
Think about a piano keyboard. If you start at the left and play one note at a a time, you’ll notice the old familiar doe-ray-me scale pattern repeating itself every eight notes. Each doe-ray-me group is an octave. Count twelve white keys from the left and you'll have about the lowest bass note a male singer can hit. Count fifteen in from the far right and you'll be at the high note for a female soprano.
Within that span of human capability, an individual singer can generally cover about two of those octaves. Where they fall within the span and how wide a range they can cover is determined by gender and their individual physical development.
Since most western popular music is composed of notes that fall within two octaves, it seems clear that with good pitch control, most singers can cover most songs if they are played in a key that matches the singer’s range.
So what’s my range?
Unless you attend formal voice training, you probably wouldn’t know. In our next report, we’ll review some quick an dirty ways to find out as well as the ranges of many popular artists for comparison. In the meantime, check out the topics Music Keys and Vocal Range in Wikipedia for more in depth information.
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