I delete most of my posts after a month or so to keep my blog manageable and to organize my reblogs. You have my permission to reblog whatever deleted post I made. It wouldn’t be on the internet if I wasn’t okay with it getting shared.
Here are some of the major resources I’ve made and some of my sideblogs in case you’re looking for something that I reblogged, plus my answers to the tech questions I get most frequently:
Every time I start looking at vocal range videos to try to get back into practice singing I feel like I'm being gaslit.
You search for "songs for women with low voices" and.
Fucking. "Girls just wanna have fun" is on this list.
Bullshit.
A few years ago i had a vocal coach and I had to buy a music book from the store but I didn't know what would be right so the coach had me sing some Disney songs then walked out of the practice room and grabbed me a book with Hozier songs; unfortunately his highs are WAY higher than mine and most of his lows are on, like, the high end of my low range. The "offer me that deathless death" line in "Take me to Church" is a strain but all the low bits are easy.
This is why I'm feeling a little nuts. Like, I'm looking at baritone songs at this point. "Cellophane" from Chicago is like pretty much the perfect comfortable spot for me.
I should try recording sixteen tons. I can't hit the low lows in that but I bet it'd still sound rad.
For the Orville Peck recs in the notes, it's the same issue as Hozier - i can sing every word in "Big Sky" comfortably *except* the high note in "sky" in the chorus goes too high for me. I think i could probably hit that note in isolation, but he's sliding around it and it's in that break range for me so i can't connect it with the other sounds around it. I looooove Orville Peck but the highs kind of kill me.
I think people may be missing some of what's frustrating here - songs written for baritone singers are sometimes too low for me, but they are never too high. Annie Lennox (whom I adore, and who was recced a lot) has low notes that are way below standard pop music but she can sing 11 notes above the top of my range, whereas the low end of baritone is only 2 notes lower than what i can reliably hit.
That's why it feels a bit disorienting to search for low-voiced women singers, because so many of them also have enormous ranges and can also sing really, really high compared to me. I'm not looking to find the low end, I'm attempting to restrict the top end.
(I ended up downloading a tuning app, my current range is B2 to B4 - I can absolutely get a few notes higher with training and practice but I'm guessing that F5 is beyond me)
But also yes Tracy Chapman my beloved <3 <3
Does this go too high? (The range numbers mean nothing to my brain sorry :S )
Or this? (It's really short though)
So these are interesting; according to this site that lists vocal ranges in a ton of songs, the first one is technically in my range! But, while this song doesn’t go super high it does spend a lot of time in the higher end of my range - I can hit an A4 but it takes planning and I certainly can’t hold it. I probably could practice this song and get a version of it down, but it would be a strain.
The second song is much closer to comfortable, I think it’s something singable for me but the challenge there is how quiet it is - it might actually be really good practice for me to try to get a little more control at lower volumes because I have a lot of trouble trying to sing softly.
Someone has possibly sarcastically suggested that the singer I should practice along with is Tom Waits and they had no way of knowing that I have the horniest “Heartattack and Vine” you’ve ever goddamned heard. (Tom Waits is actually really comfortable for me to sing along to - it’s transposed up, obviously, but he’s not making use of a huge range so I don’t peak out)
came down the hall to find that Large Bastard had snapped and was removing the ceiling fan from our back room because he was tired of hitting his head on it.
he's not *wrong* to do this, it's just weird to find someone standing flat footed on the ground grumbling at a ceiling fan he's unhooking.
It's a room with a low ceiling and the fan was installed on a beam that was about four inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and his head didn't *quite* hit the blades but he's been ducking around the light fixture in the center since we moved in and as such that has mostly become a junk room (it's supposed to be a combination workshop and gym; it's an un-insulated addition to the house with weird electrical stuff) because he can't actually move stuff around in there.
So if nothing else this should hopefully get me easier access to my bench.
I love any opportunity for fresh demonstrations of the largeness of the bastard.
Success! The back room is now bastard proofed.
came down the hall to find that Large Bastard had snapped and was removing the ceiling fan from our back room because he was tired of hitting his head on it.
he's not *wrong* to do this, it's just weird to find someone standing flat footed on the ground grumbling at a ceiling fan he's unhooking.
It's a room with a low ceiling and the fan was installed on a beam that was about four inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and his head didn't *quite* hit the blades but he's been ducking around the light fixture in the center since we moved in and as such that has mostly become a junk room (it's supposed to be a combination workshop and gym; it's an un-insulated addition to the house with weird electrical stuff) because he can't actually move stuff around in there.
So if nothing else this should hopefully get me easier access to my bench.
I love any opportunity for fresh demonstrations of the largeness of the bastard.
This is an odd room that has the potential to be a nice room but it is also the un-heated, un-insulated room with an entire wall of thin windows and a roof that used to leak where i had to sleep in the winter of 2003-2004 so i don't actually want to spend a ton of time in it, so large bastard can do whatever he wants to the ceiling.
That was one of those things that seemed normal at the time and kind of fucked up later.
My aunt moved in with us for almost a year and i gave her my bedroom and in retrospect I’m not sure why that meant i couldn’t sleep on the couch in the heated house instead of in the enclosed patio that got down to the 30s at night. I spent most of that winter huddled in my girl scout sleeping bag on a futon that i had to move to the non-wet part of the room when it rained.
came down the hall to find that Large Bastard had snapped and was removing the ceiling fan from our back room because he was tired of hitting his head on it.
he's not *wrong* to do this, it's just weird to find someone standing flat footed on the ground grumbling at a ceiling fan he's unhooking.
It's a room with a low ceiling and the fan was installed on a beam that was about four inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and his head didn't *quite* hit the blades but he's been ducking around the light fixture in the center since we moved in and as such that has mostly become a junk room (it's supposed to be a combination workshop and gym; it's an un-insulated addition to the house with weird electrical stuff) because he can't actually move stuff around in there.
So if nothing else this should hopefully get me easier access to my bench.
I love any opportunity for fresh demonstrations of the largeness of the bastard.
This is an odd room that has the potential to be a nice room but it is also the un-heated, un-insulated room with an entire wall of thin windows and a roof that used to leak where i had to sleep in the winter of 2003-2004 so i don’t actually want to spend a ton of time in it, so large bastard can do whatever he wants to the ceiling.
came down the hall to find that Large Bastard had snapped and was removing the ceiling fan from our back room because he was tired of hitting his head on it.
he's not *wrong* to do this, it's just weird to find someone standing flat footed on the ground grumbling at a ceiling fan he's unhooking.
It's a room with a low ceiling and the fan was installed on a beam that was about four inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and his head didn't *quite* hit the blades but he's been ducking around the light fixture in the center since we moved in and as such that has mostly become a junk room (it's supposed to be a combination workshop and gym; it's an un-insulated addition to the house with weird electrical stuff) because he can't actually move stuff around in there.
So if nothing else this should hopefully get me easier access to my bench.
I love any opportunity for fresh demonstrations of the largeness of the bastard.
came down the hall to find that Large Bastard had snapped and was removing the ceiling fan from our back room because he was tired of hitting his head on it.
he’s not *wrong* to do this, it’s just weird to find someone standing flat footed on the ground grumbling at a ceiling fan he’s unhooking.
It’s a room with a low ceiling and the fan was installed on a beam that was about four inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and his head didn’t *quite* hit the blades but he’s been ducking around the light fixture in the center since we moved in and as such that has mostly become a junk room (it’s supposed to be a combination workshop and gym; it’s an un-insulated addition to the house with weird electrical stuff) because he can’t actually move stuff around in there.
So if nothing else this should hopefully get me easier access to my bench.
Every time I start looking at vocal range videos to try to get back into practice singing I feel like I'm being gaslit.
You search for "songs for women with low voices" and.
Fucking. "Girls just wanna have fun" is on this list.
Bullshit.
A few years ago i had a vocal coach and I had to buy a music book from the store but I didn't know what would be right so the coach had me sing some Disney songs then walked out of the practice room and grabbed me a book with Hozier songs; unfortunately his highs are WAY higher than mine and most of his lows are on, like, the high end of my low range. The "offer me that deathless death" line in "Take me to Church" is a strain but all the low bits are easy.
This is why I'm feeling a little nuts. Like, I'm looking at baritone songs at this point. "Cellophane" from Chicago is like pretty much the perfect comfortable spot for me.
I should try recording sixteen tons. I can't hit the low lows in that but I bet it'd still sound rad.
For the Orville Peck recs in the notes, it’s the same issue as Hozier - i can sing every word in “Big Sky” comfortably *except* the high note in “sky” in the chorus goes too high for me. I think i could probably hit that note in isolation, but he’s sliding around it and it’s in that break range for me so i can’t connect it with the other sounds around it. I looooove Orville Peck but the highs kind of kill me.
I think people may be missing some of what’s frustrating here - songs written for baritone singers are sometimes too low for me, but they are never too high. Annie Lennox (whom I adore, and who was recced a lot) has low notes that are way below standard pop music but she can sing 11 notes above the top of my range, whereas the low end of baritone is only 2 notes lower than what i can reliably hit.
That’s why it feels a bit disorienting to search for low-voiced women singers, because so many of them also have enormous ranges and can also sing really, really high compared to me. I’m not looking to find the low end, I’m attempting to restrict the top end.
(I ended up downloading a tuning app, my current range is B2 to B4 - I can absolutely get a few notes higher with training and practice but I’m guessing that F5 is beyond me)
But also yes Tracy Chapman my beloved <3 <3
In my college American poetry class we had to do memorized readings of three poems, one of the ones I chose was Langston Hughes’ “Weary Blues” because I’d already built a dramatic performance of it in high school.
This was an interesting college class because it was tiny (16 students at the start of the quarter, 12 at the end) and because it was *poetry* a lot of people in the class fudged the readings and did them the day of class, which meant that they weren’t really prepared to discuss them. After two excruciating classes in a row where I was the only person ready to discuss the readings (in the second class I literally had to sit on my hands to keep myself from trying to speak after the professor said “Alli cannot answer for the rest of the hour, somebody else say something” and then nobody did for another ten minutes of the most awkward silence I have ever encountered), the professor brought in lyric sheets for “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess.
He started the class with our normal written quiz, then asked who was ready to talk. I was, because of course I was, but nobody else raised their hands.
“If you’re not going to talk, then you’re going to sing,” he said, and handed out lyrics to everyone. “We are all adults, and we have an adult agreement that you will read the assignments and be prepared to discuss them, and I will lead discussions and teach you about the readings. You are not holding up your end of the agreement like adults, so I’m treating you like children, and your participation for the last three classes will not be based on your quizzes - which is good news for a lot of you - but on doing a sing-along today. So I’m going to sing this first, then we’re going to sing it five times together, and then we’re going to talk about the song together, and you are going to do your readings before my next class or I am going to be handing out more lyrics and we’ll sing another song together like kindergartens.”
That class is why the four students who dropped did so, but everyone who stayed was prepared for discussions for the rest of the quarter.
Anyway, that was before our second poetry presentation so by that point I’d already sung with these people and had no shame, so i decided I was going to actually sing the singer’s part in “Weary Blues.”
I recorded it on my phone and asked my friend Lindsey, who was in the class and happened to be a choir director, to listen to it and tell me if it sounded terrible. She said that it did not and asked if I had any vocal training and I said no and she said “you should join a choir” and i felt very flattered and continued practicing and memorizing the poem.
We had to give critiques of each person’s performance, and most people were generally polite like you normally would be when giving feedback, but apparently one young woman was still pissed at me for being a suck-up and doing the assigned readings.
“First of all i couldn’t even pay attention to the rest of the poem because you sound like a man. I think singing was a weird choice and singing like a man made it impossible for me to take your reading seriously” and i was a bit surprised (so were other people) but simply said “thank you, that’s good to know, i was trying to sound like a man because the speaker in the poem describes the singer as a man, it’s good to know i hit that mark” and we moved on.
Lindsey and the professor both checked in on me at the end of class, Lindsey to say “practice made that sound really really really good you should join a choir” and the professor to say “i was leery when you asked to sing part of your poem, i don’t usually allow that but I’m glad i did” and both to ask if I was upset by the other student’s comments.
I was not upset. Mentally i was jumping up and down and doing backflips and was bummed because the other student was probably just being mean and didn’t actually think my voice sounded masculine.
But now I’m finding videos with titles like “is that my mom or a dude? Learning about the contralto range” and I’m like haha wait yeah, gender euphoria is stored in the vocal cords.
Anonymous asked:
I have what might be a very silly question. Is there a reason you can't use a tuning app to test / check your vocal range? (i have Tuner from fdroid which is a bit a different style from other tuners i've seen).
Please bear in mind i'm coming from "i took some singing lessons as an adult and had to learn 'how to recognise when one's pitch matches that of another sound' pretty much from scratch" but to start to practice that, i had my headphones in my laptop with the online piano, and my phone next to me with the tuning app open so i could double-check i had the pitch right.
(i'm still mad that all the "learn to sing" advice online assumed i already knew how to recognise when i matched pitch, but i digress)
ms-demeanor answered:
It just straight up had not occurred to me, i use pedal tuners for my guitars and didn’t think about an app.
…….. that *can’t* be right
I just followed along with a bass baritone warmup; B2 is the lowest I can hit consistently with good power behind it right now and I have to sing down to it, but I don't think that A2 is actually out of reach.
So I think if I'm understanding correctly, I'm a contralto because that's where most of my most comfortable singing lies, but my actual range covers pretty much *exactly* the baritone range and the highest third of the contralto "standard" is (currently) out of my comfort zone.
Okay yeah no wonder it's easier for me to sing along with John C. Reilly than it is for me to sing along with Renee Zellweger.
But there is also this very funny feeling I’m having right now of “If you can’t get store bought, homemade is fine” about things to sing along to.
I was trying to sing along to Dalla Sua Pace earlier because “okay contralto that’s like basically tenor right?” and was struggling against the highs (and the fact that I am NOT an opera singer) but not the lows.
But also probably most baritone songs are going to be too low too much of the time for me to sing comfortably. (For instance, Elvis: I can do “Viva Las Vegas” pretty well, but “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” is beyond me because of the way the pressure is different on the low spots between those songs)
So I will simply have to continue making my own songs to sing along to.
Anonymous asked:
I have what might be a very silly question. Is there a reason you can't use a tuning app to test / check your vocal range? (i have Tuner from fdroid which is a bit a different style from other tuners i've seen).
Please bear in mind i'm coming from "i took some singing lessons as an adult and had to learn 'how to recognise when one's pitch matches that of another sound' pretty much from scratch" but to start to practice that, i had my headphones in my laptop with the online piano, and my phone next to me with the tuning app open so i could double-check i had the pitch right.
(i'm still mad that all the "learn to sing" advice online assumed i already knew how to recognise when i matched pitch, but i digress)
ms-demeanor answered:
It just straight up had not occurred to me, i use pedal tuners for my guitars and didn’t think about an app.
…….. that *can’t* be right
I just followed along with a bass baritone warmup; B2 is the lowest I can hit consistently with good power behind it right now and I have to sing down to it, but I don’t think that A2 is actually out of reach.
So I think if I’m understanding correctly, I’m a contralto because that’s where most of my most comfortable singing lies, but my actual range covers pretty much *exactly* the baritone range and the highest third of the contralto “standard” is (currently) out of my comfort zone.
Okay yeah no wonder it’s easier for me to sing along with John C. Reilly than it is for me to sing along with Renee Zellweger.
Anonymous asked:
I have what might be a very silly question. Is there a reason you can't use a tuning app to test / check your vocal range? (i have Tuner from fdroid which is a bit a different style from other tuners i've seen).
Please bear in mind i'm coming from "i took some singing lessons as an adult and had to learn 'how to recognise when one's pitch matches that of another sound' pretty much from scratch" but to start to practice that, i had my headphones in my laptop with the online piano, and my phone next to me with the tuning app open so i could double-check i had the pitch right.
(i'm still mad that all the "learn to sing" advice online assumed i already knew how to recognise when i matched pitch, but i digress)
It just straight up had not occurred to me, i use pedal tuners for my guitars and didn’t think about an app.
…….. that *can’t* be right
Every time I start looking at vocal range videos to try to get back into practice singing I feel like I'm being gaslit.
You search for "songs for women with low voices" and.
Fucking. "Girls just wanna have fun" is on this list.
Bullshit.
A few years ago i had a vocal coach and I had to buy a music book from the store but I didn't know what would be right so the coach had me sing some Disney songs then walked out of the practice room and grabbed me a book with Hozier songs; unfortunately his highs are WAY higher than mine and most of his lows are on, like, the high end of my low range. The "offer me that deathless death" line in "Take me to Church" is a strain but all the low bits are easy.
This is why I'm feeling a little nuts. Like, I'm looking at baritone songs at this point. "Cellophane" from Chicago is like pretty much the perfect comfortable spot for me.
I should try recording sixteen tons. I can't hit the low lows in that but I bet it'd still sound rad.
Okay vocal range is complicated. True contraltos are kind of rare, sounds like you might be one, and often time people don't know what to do with that. I have no idea what ranges look like in pop music, but in musical theater there are plenty of songs that can be sung by altos, just not ones written in the last ten-twenty years. What's happened in contemporary musical theater is that the words "alto" and "soprano" kind of became words for vocal weight and where the belt range exists. So women who are technically "altos" are being made to belt ridiculously high (something that is harder if not impossible for sopranos) but certainly into what a soprano used to sing and that belt range is kind of defining the alto range even though she's singing ....the same notes as a soprano. Elephaba and Glinda are actually good examples of this. With the exception of Glindas really high notes in no one mourns the wicked and thank goodness, their ranges are ...similar. I'm not saying most singers could sing either part because they're different voice types and weights, but their ranges are very similar. Also a lot of what people call altos in musical theater are mezzos.
So yeah, kinda you're being gas lit, is what I'm trying to say.
But there are a lot of songs that are written quite low. Look at "turn back o man" from Godspell and "diamonds are a girl's best friend" from gentlemen prefer blondes (the ORIGINAL key, not Marilyn's key which is a little higher) "send in the clowns" from a little night music, maybe "science fiction double feature" from rocky horror picture show. I have a friend who's a True Contralo, there just ISNT a head voice there. She changes keys on everything and she does struggle with material but she's a semi professional singer so the material is out there. I'm trying to think what she does, some of those are her numbers. My other advice is look into 20s-40s jazz and American songbook songs. Those are usually written pretty low and they're not rangy, theyre what I call gentle on the voice.
I wish I had some notes to figure out exactly what range you have, because I do think that if you're singing baritone songs in the baritone octave you're dealing with a VERY low voice but there can also be some fear about accessing higher notes and maybe you just don't know the technique to get to your head voice. I'd also love to know which version of mr. Cellophane is sitting right for you.
I hope this helps! I'm not a voice teacher or anything I just know a lot of musical theater rep and like to help people find good songs.
Oh wow the "there's no head voice" resonates so hard - I have a really hard break between chest and head and part of why I wanted to go to a vocal coach in the first place was to try to smooth that out (it didn't really work. yet. I'll get there someday. It's better than it used to be).
I've got no idea what my top range is (low, like very very low - I do not have a wide range, and where I'm at on the high end now is actually a drastic improvement because of practice) and I'm not a music theory understander, but I remember my vocal coach saying that I was hitting low F when we were doing warmups. I can definitely get lower now than when I was working with her (which would have been in like 2018).
The version of Mr. Cellophane that feels good to me is the John C. Reilly one from the movie, which doesn't go super deep I don't think. I can't hang out in my low end for a whole song so I'd struggle to do a full Type O-Negative cover matching Peter Steele, but it's hard to find songs that are in, like, a low tenor range. I don't think I'm actually anywhere close to a baritone, it's just that my high end is about the same as the high end for a baritone.
This is a song from my band that has some of the lower notes I've recorded; it doesn't cover my whole range but the high note on "before" at 47 seconds is getting very close to as high as I can go. The low on "through" in the chorus (1:10-1:12 and repeated later) isn't the bottom of my range but I've got to be warmed up and practiced to get lower than that and do so in a way that's clean (in the song it's raspy with intentionally because it's a metal song).
If anyone could tell me what those notes are at those time stamps that might actually be really handy.
I'll look into the jazz standards; a lot of the songs I end up singing to myself and practicing are folk songs that have the same easy-on-the-voice feel.
Thank you for the in-depth notes!
You may have noticed that while I had a band that had at least a 45 minute set I only (or mostly) ever post “Sirens,” which isn’t terribly representative of us in terms of music we recorded. There are several reasons for this and I think they’re worthwhile to talk about while I’m talking about voice practice and singing and learning to sing but also I want to give a tip to any musicians out there who are thinking of releasing music that you have *recorded* but have not *played.*
So the first reason I prefer showing off Sirens is because I’m a much better, more developed singer than I was when I started the band with my friend Dani. Spiders, the song at the top of this reblog, was recorded and released in 2017 and Sirens (the song in the previous reblog) was recorded in 2019 and released in 2020. In between the recording of the two songs I took a few months of vocal lessons, I rehearsed with the band at least once a week, and I played a show with my band twice a month. Spiders was recorded in my friend’s bedroom/studio and the vocals were composed by me singing to myself quietly in my garage before I had ever sang in front of an audience or even into an actual microphone. I was an *extremely* inexperienced singer, and the recording here is probably something like my twentieth time singing the song all the way through. You can hear how careful I have to be with my voice, it’s light and narrow, there’s no power to it. At that point I was *incapable* of the power build that comes at the end of Sirens.
I’m bringing this up to show what a difference three years of pretty intense practice and performance make, but also as a bit of a warning.
When Dani and I recorded Spiders, P.I.T. was me and Dani and a bunch of separate recordings Dani had done of various instruments (Dani is so talented and so skilled - Sirens started out as a track called “Bass Dirge” because Dani wrote it to have a fun bass song to play because they are primarily a bassist, but they are also an incredible multi-instrumentalist who became our guitarist after the first guitarist left the band and who would take over the drums from time to time during rehearsals to show the drummer how to play various parts - if anything we ever made sounded good it’s because Dani wrote such good music for us to build from). Dani wrote brilliant instrumental pieces and gave them to me and I figured out a vocal line and wrote lyrics, occasionally saying something like “I think we need to make the bridge weirder” or “what if the drums sounded more echoey.” Dani recorded my vocals and mixed them and created a six song demo for us that we released as an EP (so we could show people what our idea of the band was) and would send out to prospective drummers and guitarists. And, unfortunately, those songs never got re-recorded. And it drives me insane, because there was one song we dropped entirely from our setlist, and other than that every single song we wrote evolved through months of playing into something much better than what we started with. We’d find problems in the recording that needed to be adjusted to a live performance and the adjusted version got a little longer and a little harder and a little more distorted until something that started out sounding like an 80s darkwave song ended up with an undeniable postrock vibe because the guitarist who joined us was into shoegaze.
My voice got stronger and I had to learn to move around a stage and sometimes parts of the performance became parts of the song - during the “bury me now” bridge on Spiders it didn’t feel right to do some kind of halfhearted swaying so I started dropping to my knees, laying flat on the stage, and doing like a backbend/camel pose to get off the ground as I came back into the chorus and the song picked up speed again. But in order to justify that while singing the song needed a LOT more force.
This photo was taken as I was rising out of the “bury me” backbend and pushing into the chorus.
That section is at about 3:30 in the song, and the song as recorded is a complete mismatch for the kind of snarl and roar that came out of years of practice.
The difference with Sirens is that we didn’t record that song until after several weeks of actually practicing playing it with the whole band. The original Bass Dirge doesn’t have the same guitar build at the end, that build was influenced by Dani and our former shoegaze guitarist being nerds about pedals together. I didn’t record the vocals until after we’d played it enough in practice that I knew where I needed to get a breath in before the six second sustained “down” and “drown” in the final chorus. The recording we’ve released is still nowhere near as hard or heavy as it sounded in practice, but it is miles and miles better than the first songs we released not only because we had all learned more in the natural course of practice, but because that specific song was practiced *as a whole* before it was released.
Sadly, we were getting ready to do a live recording EP with the heavier versions of a lot of those songs in early March of 2020.
So the two takeaways I want you to have from this are:
I love the way that sirens sounds, but every time I listen to that thready, whispery, timid little voice on Spiders I wonder what I was thinking when I decided that it would be totally cool to release a song that I’d never actually sang all they way through.
Also I love talking about my band and I miss my band and I’ve been wanting to make more music for a long time and getting back into vocal practice seems like as good a time as any to start tinkering with stuff.
Every time I start looking at vocal range videos to try to get back into practice singing I feel like I'm being gaslit.
You search for "songs for women with low voices" and.
Fucking. "Girls just wanna have fun" is on this list.
Bullshit.
A few years ago i had a vocal coach and I had to buy a music book from the store but I didn't know what would be right so the coach had me sing some Disney songs then walked out of the practice room and grabbed me a book with Hozier songs; unfortunately his highs are WAY higher than mine and most of his lows are on, like, the high end of my low range. The "offer me that deathless death" line in "Take me to Church" is a strain but all the low bits are easy.
This is why I'm feeling a little nuts. Like, I'm looking at baritone songs at this point. "Cellophane" from Chicago is like pretty much the perfect comfortable spot for me.
I should try recording sixteen tons. I can't hit the low lows in that but I bet it'd still sound rad.
Okay vocal range is complicated. True contraltos are kind of rare, sounds like you might be one, and often time people don't know what to do with that. I have no idea what ranges look like in pop music, but in musical theater there are plenty of songs that can be sung by altos, just not ones written in the last ten-twenty years. What's happened in contemporary musical theater is that the words "alto" and "soprano" kind of became words for vocal weight and where the belt range exists. So women who are technically "altos" are being made to belt ridiculously high (something that is harder if not impossible for sopranos) but certainly into what a soprano used to sing and that belt range is kind of defining the alto range even though she's singing ....the same notes as a soprano. Elephaba and Glinda are actually good examples of this. With the exception of Glindas really high notes in no one mourns the wicked and thank goodness, their ranges are ...similar. I'm not saying most singers could sing either part because they're different voice types and weights, but their ranges are very similar. Also a lot of what people call altos in musical theater are mezzos.
So yeah, kinda you're being gas lit, is what I'm trying to say.
But there are a lot of songs that are written quite low. Look at "turn back o man" from Godspell and "diamonds are a girl's best friend" from gentlemen prefer blondes (the ORIGINAL key, not Marilyn's key which is a little higher) "send in the clowns" from a little night music, maybe "science fiction double feature" from rocky horror picture show. I have a friend who's a True Contralo, there just ISNT a head voice there. She changes keys on everything and she does struggle with material but she's a semi professional singer so the material is out there. I'm trying to think what she does, some of those are her numbers. My other advice is look into 20s-40s jazz and American songbook songs. Those are usually written pretty low and they're not rangy, theyre what I call gentle on the voice.
I wish I had some notes to figure out exactly what range you have, because I do think that if you're singing baritone songs in the baritone octave you're dealing with a VERY low voice but there can also be some fear about accessing higher notes and maybe you just don't know the technique to get to your head voice. I'd also love to know which version of mr. Cellophane is sitting right for you.
I hope this helps! I'm not a voice teacher or anything I just know a lot of musical theater rep and like to help people find good songs.
Oh wow the “there’s no head voice” resonates so hard - I have a really hard break between chest and head and part of why I wanted to go to a vocal coach in the first place was to try to smooth that out (it didn’t really work. yet. I’ll get there someday. It’s better than it used to be).
I’ve got no idea what my top range is (low, like very very low - I do not have a wide range, and where I’m at on the high end now is actually a drastic improvement because of practice) and I’m not a music theory understander, but I remember my vocal coach saying that I was hitting low F when we were doing warmups. I can definitely get lower now than when I was working with her (which would have been in like 2018).
The version of Mr. Cellophane that feels good to me is the John C. Reilly one from the movie, which doesn’t go super deep I don’t think. I can’t hang out in my low end for a whole song so I’d struggle to do a full Type O-Negative cover matching Peter Steele, but it’s hard to find songs that are in, like, a low tenor range. I don’t think I’m actually anywhere close to a baritone, it’s just that my high end is about the same as the high end for a baritone.
This is a song from my band that has some of the lower notes I’ve recorded; it doesn’t cover my whole range but the high note on “before” at 47 seconds is getting very close to as high as I can go. The low on “through” in the chorus (1:10-1:12 and repeated later) isn’t the bottom of my range but I’ve got to be warmed up and practiced to get lower than that and do so in a way that’s clean (in the song it’s raspy with intentionally because it’s a metal song).
If anyone could tell me what those notes are at those time stamps that might actually be really handy.
I’ll look into the jazz standards; a lot of the songs I end up singing to myself and practicing are folk songs that have the same easy-on-the-voice feel.
Thank you for the in-depth notes!
