Well, without actually hearing you sing, it's difficult to say for certain what's going on. I would imagine that since you already know you can hit the low G, you're probably an alto or perhaps mezzo-soprano, but that wouldn't preclude tones above the A in the staff from your range, including the D above C in the staff (D5 by the way). I imagine you are keeping your voice in the chest register when you go higher, as this is one of the ways you can lose some range. The exact area of your range where the switch would need to happen is different for everyone, but a professional coach could help you find out more about your individual voice and how to get the most from it. I've always been a G to G baritone, so singing more than an octave has never been difficult for me. There are range building exercises you can do, and exercises that help you sing on true resonance instead of forcing the voice (not saying you are, as I haven't heard you sing, but I've got cantors who give me the same complaint about music being too high at D5 and they force, force, force with no head/mixed register)! The "C to shining C" range is pretty comfortable for most people, as this is the standard, one octave range we all have as children. However, the voice develops as you get older, and you gain higher tones and lower tones.

I almost forgot, are you male or female, and are you an adult? It would change some of my advice.

The "what's too high?" discussion has been kicked around on this forum several times before and it always gets heated.

The two most commonly identified vocal registers are chest (mainly lower portion of the voice) and mixed (usually the higher portion), but beware: they do not always divide the voice equally. For example, my chest register is short, only about a fifth or sixth into my total range, then I have to use mixed for the rest of it, which happens to be the majority of my range. Yours will likely be different, as everyone's voice is unique to them.

As an adult male, you are likely a bass, baritone, or tenor, however there is a fourth class called countertenor, which is an adult male most comfortable in the alto range. These are rare, though, but they have a beautiful sound. You should have your choir director give you a range test to see where you might fit. That would be the best thing to do to get started.

I downloaded a pitch detector and have been testing myself. Come to find out, I was wrong before. My low is about the F2 (according to Wikipedia's numbers). Which is exactly where baritones start on that chart Liam linked. My problem is I can only get up to the B3.

So sounds like ClergetKubisz is correct, the problem is me. I need to figure out how to get my head register activated...so I can get the higher baritone notes. I've been sitting here at home trying to figure it out, but no luck. Just a bunch of silly squeaks! I'll have to find someone to teach me.

I was just thinking...is that what people mean by singing "falsetto"? Are baritones basically asked to sing falsetto if they wish to sing at Mass?

If so, maybe that's why my pastor and friends have trouble. None of us can sing falsetto! (There's also a bit of a stigma attached to it for manly men, right?)

No, b-tones don't have to sing falsetto at Mass :) I use full voice all the time. As for the "manly" part: that's one thing that causes trouble for untrained male singers. They all want to be basses at first, until some of them realize they'll never be. Don't be too caught up in that. Also realize that falsetto is not considered full voice for men. When reading treble clef, you will actually be singing an octave lower, so don't try to match pitch exactly with the ladies! The way I describe head voice is the same explanation given by the Italian soprano Louisa di Tetrazzini in her treatise "The Art of Singing:" I can feel vibrations mostly in the lower jaw along the sides. For chest voice, it's in the chest area immediately beneath the neck, sort of where the neck meets the chest. It is important to make sure there is enough space in the mouth for proper resonance. Raising the soft palate is central to this. You can Google any of this for definitions if you need them, but that should get you started. This of course is no substitute for proper vocal training, and as always YMMV.

Actually, I recall both from research and anecdotal testament that the bass-baritone laryngeal structure is more successful when developing the timbre and flexibility of a countertenor.
For the gentleman seeking to extend your formant (chest) range thru to the mixed and falsetto, the first objective is to simply know you have a falsetto in the first place. Do some ascending/descending siren vocals on "oo" and get passed the " yodel break" and keep the siren pitch ascending as high as is comfortable, no matter if the sound displeases you.
Then the next step would more involve the coordination between your ear (inner and outer), brain and voice to recognize that you can match specific pitches in the two upper ranges with accuracy and stability.
From there, with work, the voice should open.

Yes, meloCharles, that is correct. Most successful countertenors (men who sing as altos/mezzo-sopranos while utilizing primarily falsetto) would sing as baritones when using their modal register or "chest" voice. It is unusual for a natural tenor to sing successfully as a countertenor.

Melofluent

I am one of those people who doesn't have a falsetto. FWIW. It may have been a function of years of horn training, but my vocal chords won't form the right way to move past that second passaggio point.

Thanks again to you all, especially ClergetKubisz. I'm making it through all the chant recordings now (well, except for the graduals)...hitting all the high pitches. It's been wonderful for me, taking out my new Gregorian Missal and singing along with the ordinaries and the propers. I want to encourage everyone to keep up your efforts to bring this beautiful music to the world's parishes. (And yes, I've been throwing out word locally, to see if I can find someone to teach me properly.)

I feel like all the professional musicians here are missing the point of the Original Poster's issue and question.

avscvlta:

1. Your range isn't unusual. It is typical of untrained male singers. I imagine your priest is also not a trained singer (and male).

2. When your priest just sings something unaccompanied, it's going to be about in the middle of his range, which is going to be about in the middle of yours. This seems totally normal.

3. All the talk about falsetto is really beside the point.

4. It is typical for church choirs to sing things higher than you, as a typical untrained male singer, are comfortable. There's a range of factors contributing to this:
-a historical assumption of SATB singing, giving the melody to Sopranos
-the rise in concert pitch over the last 150 years (coupled with a fussbudgetish adherence to written scores)
-the imbalance of women over men in music ministry
-the prevalence of frustrated sopranos with operatic aspirations
-a culture of "song leader"
-David Haas

5. Moreover - one of the bigger issues with an untrained male singer trying to sing with a female song leader is more of a brain problem than a voice problem. You (usually) have to sing an octave lower than the female singer, and this can sometimes be weird or confusing, if you don't know what going on.
-Sometimes, if your lower range isn't all that great, you'll find yourself comfortably sing in the same octave as the women in the lower end of the song's range, and then flipping out as the pitch ascends.
-A similar problem then happens in reverse.
-The octave jumping sometimes happens without you noticing it, or being able to control it.
-The timbre (sound quality) of men's and women's voices are (usually) different. Because of this: for the set of notes shared by both ranges, females tend to sound (feel) low and rich, while men tend to sound high and dramatic. Even though it's exactly the same pitch. It's can be very confusing.

6. Because of all the issues in [5], you may be having problems because you're trying too hard to match exact pitch (D above middle C) instead of relative pitch class (which D is right for your voice range). You may also find it uncomfortable that your voice is sticking out of the texture, even though you're singing the right notes.


If you want to become a better singer, by all means get some voice training. Also, if it's an option, think about joining the choir.

But, I'd be surprised if the root of your problem is REALLY about your own range and abilities. I think it has a lot more to do with the culture and sonic environment of your parish (which is not unusual at all) and the larger context of American Catholic parish music.


When in the congregation, just try to relax about it and sing God's praises. If someone complains about your voice sticks out like a sore thumb, tell them that if they sang louder themselves they wouldn't hear you anymore.

the condescending first sentence.
I'm sorry you felt "professionals here" missed the point.

I was not trying to be condescending.

If a child asks what 4 + 5 is, a dissertation on number theory is missing the point. Mentioning this is not an attack on number theory or professional mathematicians.

I'm not sure how you got to the idea that I have some issue with professional musicianship or academic training or whatever it is you are reading into one sentence.

If it's not clear, all I meant was that the frame of reference for answering the question was off, and that that this misalignment has to do with precisely the fact that professional (high quality, well trained) musicians here are used to thinking about a different set of issues than the ones I think the OP was asking about.

I wasn't comparing the mentality of the OP to a child. I was making an analogy about answering the wrong question.

The apparently gratuitous and offensive first sentence of my response above was simply an attempt to say: I think the majority of respondents here are answering the wrong question. I thought it was worth mentioning this point. Particularly I thought it was worth mentioning because he seemed to think the answers had been helpful, and it was JUST MY FEELING/OPINION that the answers provided weren't at all addressing the underlying issue. And had already thought this was case from the first couple answers, and felt so even more when the OP asked if men were expected to sing falsetto at Mass. That question was a big red flag that the discussion was on the complete wrong track.

It did not occur to me that anyone would think I was disparaging musical professionalism or otherwise engaging in any form of anti-academic musical proletarian agit-prop. If it had even occurred to me that anyone would have taken it that way, I probably would have thought, "Nah. People know me better than that."

Maybe my perception of how I come across to others on the Forum is not at all what I think it is.

Is that cisgoose and transgander or transgoose and cisgander? It's so confusing.

+1

-1 that should put things back on an even keel.

∞

Yes. It doesn't have a rating or like feature. And it is certainly bereft of purple lettering, if not purple prose.

I also started this red flag for folks who lapse into habitual spin:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/737666faa2d722da289d00bae18778f5/tumblr_mkzwb4HQ8R1qztvpwo1_500.gif

It's been awhile since I've posted on this Forum so some or all of you may no longer be here. After all, this question was originally posted about 6 years ago. I want to thank all of you and to say I am glad I hit the search button before asking my question.

I have two male singers at the seminary and one is a real Bass and the other a Baritone and we just found out he is a Baritone. Each of them approach their register "break" from opposite directions. Because they have "limited" themselves by not wanting to move into their pissagio and learn how to smooth out the "break" neither are able to successfully sing a hymn at Mass.

My Bass can't sing above the G just above Middle C so he needs to get out of his chest voice. My Baritone has been working with me a year and a half. Somewhere in the last month he has found his chest voice and discovered a 4th below middle C which he didn't have a month ago.

Now I just have to convince my Bass that he has a falsetto because he can use it to find his "blended" register. It's going to be interesting.

If anyone is still listening and wants to comment please do. I've been teaching men who, more often than not, are non-singers. I have been teaching them for almost 20 years. Most of them can manage well enough to sing the hymns at Mass, some are very proficient singers but occasionally there are men who seem to have pitch problems. Most of the time the pitch problems turn out to be their desire to stay in a comfortable range. When the hymn or chant goes to high or too low they try to find the right note in that comfortable range or they just sing the melody an octave lower which seems to irritate a lot of people, mostly Formation.

All of your comments have been very helpful, thank you guys!

I use an app called Erol Singer's Studio. It's not private instruction, but it can help.

I have similar issues. I am a baritone, closer to the tenor end than bass, since I have no low notes. But I must have a small range - or rather, I have too undeveloped of an upper range. I took voice lessons while in college (I got a B.A. in music with piano as my primary instrument). I definitely learned the basics of singing from this, in addition to singing in the music department's chamber choir and the schola.

However, I do often look at this from the regular layperson's experience in the pews, since these days we like to look at "active participation" and giving the congregation the opportunity to sing what is proper to them. And the reality is that very few in the congregation, even among those who really do want to sing, for example, the Gregorian ordinaries and whatever hymns are being sung, are going to do much (if anything) to learn the techniques of singing. For this reason, it seems good for choirs to sing anything that they expect/hope the congregation to also sing in a singable range for the average person. I'm not saying that we need to growl everything out, but since most liturgical melodies and hymns that the congregation would sing have the range of an octave or slightly more, it would seem reasonable for choirs to sing these melodies so that the bulk of the notes are in, say, the D to A range, the higher end being C or maybe D and the lower end being A or so. If the range is exactly an octave, there is no reason for the hymn to go outside C to C.

I can understand that this may not be possible for hymns, when the choir wants to sing it in four parts and singing it in this lower range would be too low for basses. But for Gregorian chant, it seems ridiculous to subject the congregation to high ranges when the pitch could easily be lowered a step or two without any problem.

For example - my parish just sang Mass IV this past Sunday. Here are the pitches and ranges we used:

Kyrie - started on B-flat, making the range E-flat up to D-flat. This wasn't too bad, although I know many in the congregation wouldn't be comfortable singing parts of it in this range. There is no reason why we could have lowered it at least a half-step; personally I would have thought that significantly easier and would have appreciated a whole step lower.

Gloria - started on a D, making the range D up to D. Again, this isn't too bad either, but that would make it uncomfortable in each of the sections which rise to the D (there are 4 four of these sections). There is no reason that it couldn't have started on C, making the bulk of the chant in the D to A range.

Sanctus - started on a G, making the range D up to D. Once again, there is no reason this couldn't have been lowered one step, especially since this is a mode 8 chant making the bulk of the notes in the G-C range and up to D in the 5 parts that swing up there.

Agnus Dei - started on an F, making the range E up to D. Especially with this smaller range, there is no reason we couldn't have started at least a step lower.

I am speaking as one who holds the opinion that chant probably sounds better a little higher than lower - it gives it a lighter character as (I think) it should have - it's just that in a parish setting, if we really want to insist that the people should sing the parts proper to them, we should make it within their range of comfort.

I spent time at a monastery that did almost every chant *really* high; and that is probably okay, since chant is all they sing and all they spend time learning to sing, and thus can learn reasonably well how to sing higher. It can't be the same way in a parish setting for the average lay person.

For mixed unison singing in much of the USA, one would pitch for baritones and mezzos because they are much more widely represented than the SATB voices further out in the normal distribution.

Yes, though one might say that the addition of a third or so on top is no less a cultural phenomenon in terms of putting effort into development. Anyway, even before Rock & Roll, in the middle of the 20th century were one to conjure the likely first-off-the-tongue ID of dominant female and male white popular singers of the Great American Songbook tradition in the US, I suspect Judy Garland - contralto - and Frank Sinatra - baritone - would likely top the lists and form a cultural baseline expectation of what idealized female and male voices should sound like. And that was from a time when having pianos and instruments in the home were still common aspirations of American bourgeois life - where people were actively engaged in making music themselves. Just. (Grand opera and the voice cultivation for it were already moving into the swamps of amber.) Then the afterlife of this culture: garage bands.