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Vocal Range: What is it and how to use it?

Mychordbook can help you select the best tone for your vocals.

Why Vocal Ranges matter?

If you are a singer, after some time, you will realize that some songs belong to some specific singers are more difficult for you to sing than the others. This is due to vocal range differences. Each person has a vocal range, a lowest and a highest note that s/he can sing.

Let's have look at some examples to understand. In the below graph, we can easily see that Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song has a vocal range that is within a soprano vocal range. Therefore, a person who has soprano vocal range sing The Lazy Song easily. However, Adele - Hello song is not within the vocal-range, so a soprano singer would have difficulties singing it at the lower notes (in the below chart left side is lower notes).

Vocal Range

Vocal Range Examples

In order to solve this problem, we transpose the song (change the tone). If you did not read our Transposition Tutorial please do so now. In the above example, transposing one semitone higher of a song means to move the vocal range block, 1 block to the right. Likewise, transposing one semitone lower means to move the vocal range block, 1 block to the left.

What is the meaning of vocal range icon icon on some songs?

It means that Mychordbook knows the vocal range of that song. If Mychordbook also knows your vocal range, it can calculate the vocal difficulty of different tones. Mychordbook displays the vocal difficulties on Tone & Capo table, just near the TONE buttons with orange bars.

You can select set your vocal range from your Profile Page. If you are not a premium member, you can select one of the popular vocal ranges such as tenor or soprano. If you are a premium member, you can create your custom vocal range. If you would like to learn more about our premium features, please refer to our Pricing Page.

If both the song vocal range and your vocal range are known, Mychordbook displays the vocal range difficulties with purple bars. You can start trying different tones starting from the one with lowest vocal difficulty.

vocal difficulty display

Vocal difficulties

How vocal difficulty is calculated?

It is an unique algorithm we have developed for Mychordbook. It checks the overlap of your vocal range with the song, if there are notes that is outside of your vocal range, it increases the difficulty.