The Blogg

In a stunning display of procrastination, I answered a question today that I have wondered about for some time. Frustrated at my inability to sing along comfortably with “Redemption Song”, I tuned up my bass and started matching pitches to determine what my exact vocal range is.

The first image shows my modal register, which extends from F#2 through F4, although I can only comfortably produce G2 through D4. According to Wikipedia, a bass’s range should be F2 through E4, so I cannot quite sing low enough or comfortably high enough to be classically a bass. The baritone range is G2 through F4, which fits me if you include those notes that I can hit but not necessarily hold. I find this somewhat surprising, because when I sang in a chorus during high school I had many more problems with the upper notes written for the basses than the lower notes. Classical composers typically respected the edges of the staff, but the music we had from contemporary composers often reached several ledger lines above. Musical theater was the worst, in which I was often forced to sing in the falsetto register as the men’s parts were written in the middle of the treble clef.

Fortunately, my falsetto range (pictured above) extends from F3 through G5, with G#3 through D5 comfortable. Unfortunately, I think falsetto sounds at best strange and at worst awful, and have almost never used it since those days when I was forced to do so.

The final image is of my range in the vocal fry register. I had known for some time that I could produce low pitches with a very gravelly sort of timbre, but did not actually know that it had a name until I started doing some research for this post. While I sound bad in the falsetto register, the sounds I make in the vocal fry register cannot be described as musical at all. Apparently there is also a whistle register, but I do not know how to access it if I am even capable of doing so.

Since high school the only non-pop singing that I have done is singing hymns in churches with traditional music. Although these are typically arranged for four-part harmony (and very accessible bass ranges), basically everyone sings the soprano line and I tend to join along. Given enough time to work on it I could sing the bass parts, but I lack perfect pitch and cannot find relative pitch quickly enough for sight-reading (up a fourth, that’s “Here Comes The Bride”, now down a sixth, that is “N – B – C”, etc). Thus, I usually end up singing the soprano part transposed down an octave. Then when the melody line rises above D5 I have to drop down another octave, then return to a single-octave transposition when the melody comes back down. If I start down two octaves, then I have to jump up when the melody goes below G4. Almost every melody extends below G4, and a great many extend higher than D5, which makes it impossible for me to sing them in the modal register with a fixed transposition. As you can imagine, this is quite annoying, which is why I expected my range to be significantly less than that of the average untrained vocalist.