Do you know what your vocal range is? And do you know what voice type you are?
Let’s find out by doing 3 simple tests. For these tests you need a tuner app on your smartphone, and a piano or keyboard.
When you found out your vocal range and voice type, I would love if you share it in a comment below. Alright, let’s test your voice now! =)
Test 1 – Finding your Pitch Centre
The first test is to find out what your natural pitch centre is. Meaning the note in the middle of your range, that you feel most comfortable singing and holding.
To do this you turn on the tuning app on your smartphone, and then start humming a bunch of notes all over your range, until you finally settle on that middle note you feel most comfortable singing and sustaining.
It’s important that you don’t look at the tuner until you finally find that note, since you don’t want to be influenced by the visual feedback.
But, when you finally sing your natural middle note, look down at the tuner as you hold it and you will have found your natural pitch centre.
Test 2 – Exploring your High Vocal Range
Now that you know your pitch centre, you are going to use this note as the starting point, to explore and test how many notes you can sing above this note.
The most important aspect is that you should be honest with yourself. Only count notes you can sing comfortably, with good control, and a pleasing sound.
Here’s how to do this the high vocal range test: turn on your tuning app. Then sit by your piano keyboard and play the note that you already found out is your natural pitch centre for singing.
Hold the note on your piano, and sing along to the note with an “ah” sound. Hold the note for at least a couple of seconds.
Then you go to the next note just above it. Let’s say your pitch centre was C4, the next note you press and sing along to will be C#4, and so on.
As soon as you get to a note that you can no longer sing comfortably, with good control, and a pleasing sound…then you stop. And write down the previous note you sang well.
Test 3 – Exploring your Low Vocal Range
Finding out how low your vocal range goes is of course the opposite from exploring your high vocal range. Start with the note of your natural vocal pitch centre, and go down note by note, until you no longer can sing comfortable and a pleasing sound.
When you get to the lowest range you will start loosing a lot of volume too, and all these tests should be done without any microphone or amplification.
Because the point is to find your natural acoustic and completely acapella singing vocal range, not the electronically boosted vocal range.
So when you get to your lowest comfortable note, write that down too, and now you should have 3 notes written down: your natural pitch centre, your highest comfortable note, and your lowest comfortable note.
You can do a final check, by singing random notes starting on your pitch centre, and going up and down within the vocal range you just written down.
You should never feel your voice straining, and basically you should be able to sing all notes with good control and a pleasing sound. Great! Then you know your vocal range now!
Test 4 – Find out Your Voice Type
So let’s find out what your vocal range means in terms of your voice type. There are 4 main vocal range types in music: Bass, Tenor, Alto and Soprano.
Then there are other voice type variations that go in between thees 4 main voice types, for example: mezzo-soprano, baritone etc.
To find out what your voice type is, check this chart, and simply compare your own vocal range to which one is closest in terms of note range, based on the Harvard Dictionary of Music:
- Bass = E2-C4
- Baritone = G2-E4
- Tenor = B2-G4
- Alto = F3-D5
- Mezzo Soprano = A3-F5
- Soprano = C4-A5
For example, when I do this test, my comfortable singing vocal range is around B2 to G4, so I pretty much hit the Tenor voice type exactly. So which voice type are you?