How to find your vocal range

Your vocal range is the span from the lowest to the highest note you can sing, written as two note names such as A2–E4 or F3–C5. The number is the octave: C4 is middle C on the piano, and the number goes up by one at every C. You can find yours in about ten minutes with a piano — the steps are below.

Knowing it is less about bragging rights than about practical choices: which songs will sit comfortably, which key to sing them in, and which part to take in a choir.

Full range and comfortable range

There are really two ranges, and the second one matters more.

• Full range — every note you can produce at all, including the croaky bottom and the thin, strained top.
• Comfortable range — the notes you can sing clearly, at a normal volume, again and again without strain. Singers call the most comfortable part of it the tessitura.

A song can touch the edge of your full range once or twice. If it lives there, it will tire your voice and sound strained, however well you can hit those notes once.

Find your range with a piano

You need a piano or keyboard — the virtual piano works fine — and ten minutes. Hum or do a few gentle slides first; never test a cold voice.

1. Find your starting note. Say a relaxed "hello" and find the piano key closest to it. That is roughly the middle of your speaking voice.
2. Go down. Sing "ah" on that note, then on each white key below it. Stop when the sound turns breathy or rattly, or disappears. The last clear note is the bottom of your comfortable range; one or two notes below it may still be in your full range.
3. Go up. Back to the starting note, then up one white key at a time. It is fine to switch to a lighter, airier sound as you climb — that still counts. Stop at the first sign of squeezing, discomfort or repeated cracking. Never push through strain.
4. Write both notes down, with their numbers. The virtual piano labels every key.
5. Repeat on another day. Range changes with warm-up, time of day, tiredness and colds. Two or three sessions give a far truer answer than one.

Recording yourself helps: on playback it is much easier to hear where the sound stopped being clear.

Range is not the same as voice type

Soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto (contralto), tenor, baritone and bass are voice types. Range is one clue, not the whole answer. A teacher also listens to:

• Tessitura — where your voice sounds best and stays comfortable, not just where it can reach.
• Timbre — the colour of the voice: bright and light, or dark and heavy.
• Register changes — the points where your voice shifts gear, which fall at different pitches in different voice types.

Two people with the same range can be different voice types, and the types overlap a lot. These are the approximate ranges usually quoted for choir singers; trained soloists often go beyond them.

Treat an online test or an app's verdict as a starting point. When it really matters — choosing repertoire for an audition, say — ask a teacher, who can hear things a range test cannot.

Use your range to choose songs

For any song you want to sing, find its lowest and highest melody notes — a lead sheet or vocal score shows them, or you can pick them out on a piano — and compare them with your comfortable range.

An example: "Happy Birthday" spans exactly one octave, from its opening note to the leap at the start of the third line ("happy birthday dear…"). If your comfortable range is F3 to C5 and the song is pitched so its top note is a D5, it is two semitones too high. Lower the key by two semitones and every note drops by the same amount, so the top lands on C5.

• Both ends inside your comfortable range: sing it as written.
• A few notes too high or too low: change the key. If someone is accompanying you, the chord transposer moves their chords to the new key.
• Wider than your whole comfortable range: the song is not impossible, but it will need work at the edges of your voice. Start with something else.

Most karaoke and singing apps can change a song's key for exactly this reason; our comparison of karaoke apps with pitch feedback notes which ones do. If transposing still feels like magic, semitones and tones and keys explain what is going on.