What Do I Sing?

Struggling to determine where your voice fits.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve had as a singer is finding out where my voice fits. I grew up listening to everything form classical music to Metallica, Punk Rock to Michael Jackson and everything else in-between. Of course I have loved listening to music all of my life, however it has made my singing life more difficult as I want to do everything but can’t for one of 2 reasons. The first is, most people have a preference of style and if I am going to build a career as a performer then I need to choose. The second is, my unique vocal instrument has strengths and weakness’ like any other instrument. For example, my voice may have a lot of depth in tone from the bottom of my voice to the middle, however when I get in to the higher part of my range it loses quality of tone. I may find that my voice suits more modern rock singing which is sung lower in the range versus singing like Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake or Adam Levine which requires the voice to excel in the higher register of your voice. On the other hand my voice may not be able to produce a great deal of sound in the bottom of my range, however as I sing higher I find it easy to reach the higher notes and produce much more power than I can on the bottom. You can draw comparisons to most instruments. For example let’s look at the 4 most common types of saxophone ; Baritone , Tenor, Alto and Soprano. Each of these instruments can produce almost the same range of notes as a general rule, however they all excel in a certain parts of that range. There will be a ‘sweet spot’ where certain notes have a strong quality associated with the pitch. The singing voice works in a very similar way and this is why you do need to discover what your voice type is, and where your voice will excel. You may find that you’ve been trying to sing like Eddie Veddar from Pearl Jam but that your voice suits Pop music or Musical theatre and vice versa.