silikonindi.blogg.se - Octave range

#OCTAVE RANGE HOW TO#
#OCTAVE RANGE PROFESSIONAL#

#OCTAVE RANGE HOW TO#

Often, beginners just find the best singers out there and try to imitate what they’re doing, but that usually means choosing songs that are way too difficult for their voice, and that’s a sure-fire way to ruin your confidence! After all, you want to feel comfortable when you’re first learning how to sing, and choosing songs that fit your voice is a great start.

They pick a song they think people want to hear, rather than one they’re passionate about.Īs the founder and head voice teacher of Ramsey Voice Studio, I work with vocalists of all genres and experience, and a huge part of my job as a voice teacher is to help my students pick the right songs for their voice.

The song is wrong for the style of music they sing.

they’re a bass and they choose a tenor song).

The song doesn’t fit their voice type (e.g.

But if you’re just starting out, how can you tell if a song is actually good for your voice?Ĭan I tell you something that boggles my mind? The vast majority of beginning singers choose songs that are totally wrong for their voice! In singing performance, it definitely helps to have a solid, flexible range with some excitement or "heat" in the voice complemented, more importantly, by knowing what to do with a lyric - how to interpret a song.īut great singers don't need to "brag" about their range because, frankly, that's not what made them great singers in the first place.īy the way, from the very bottom to the very top, a four-part choir sings in about a five-octave range.Picking songs that fit your voice is one of the most important skills you can have as a singer. The best dancers don't have the biggest feet, nor do the greatest singers have the highest or lowest voices. That's because the public, the untrained singers out there, likes to sing along, too. The most popular melodies of all time have well under a two-octave range. No one person could sing the material - and if one person could, probably only dogs and whales would want to hear it anyway.

#OCTAVE RANGE PROFESSIONAL#

Really, composers simply don't write five octave songs.īurt Bacharach wrote some range-y tunes ("Do You Know The Way To San Jose?" comes to mind), but a five-octave song would have been professional suicide (and think of poor Dionne Warwick!). Sure, I didn't count his falsetto which could have given him maybe another octave - maybe - but I guess that, like Stephen Schwartz, Verdi and Puccini didn't know what to do with those two extra octaves either.

Perhaps Stephen Schwartz didn't know what to do with the other three octaves? For us guys, even Luciano Pavarotti in his prime probably had a 20-note range (about two and a half octaves). Elphaba in "Wicked" belts about a two-octave range. I never heard anything about those gals having a 40-note/five octave range! My female belters work from a low F (in the traditional alto range) up to a high Ab (about a 16 or 17-note range or two-plus octaves) which is more than plenty for a true pop/Broadway belt song. Think (old school) Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee.

There have been hundreds of female belters in pop, jazz and Broadway recordings who did groundbreaking work within an 11 or 12-note range. "Circus freak" comes to mind, but not better.

It's a publicist's claim for more ink in the Calendar section, not a claim rooted in music reality.įirst, claiming five octaves doesn't mean one is a "better" singer. Uhm, did I miss something in my college music theory class? If I read one more time that pop star #1 or voice teacher #2 has a five-octave range, I'm gonna start holding protest rallies in front of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.