So we are going to look at finding your vocal sweet spot or more specifically how to determine your range in register so that you can pick the best key for your song. I find that a lot of songwriters tend to want to put their songs too low when they're recording them. That's the thing, it's hard to know as the person singing. If you are the ones singing your own song, exactly how your voice sounds to other people. Because you are only resonating in your own body, so it's hard to tell. One good thing to always do is to do a rough recording and listen back so that you can tell better in this process of what we're about to show you. I usually try to put the highest note in the core as in the part that's repeating on a really good note place in my voice. Right. So that's usually the highest note in the chorus. So do you have a technique for working on that? For finding your highest note? Yeah, for finding the highest note that you're going to be singing in a song. I think that often in the chorus, the highest note lives around the one chord because you're often accentuating something important as you're returning to the one chord or the root of the song. So it's common that the voice will sing the third, or the root, or even the fifth sing right on a chord tone on a stable tone, on the one chord. So that's a good place to start, just look at your chorus and just establish the pinnacle moment you know what you are singing. Then how that relates. So if you know you're seeing the third, you're going to want to find where that is and then figure out what the key would be in order to sing that. Yeah. So I actually figure that stuff out pretty early. How much do you play with keys when you're working? All the time. Yeah. Because it is a really big part of making sure that the song that the vocal performance's the best. All right. So we're going to look at Sarah's voice. Sarah has a beautiful trained voice. I'm blushing. Most of us songwriters do not. So we want to make sure that that even if you don't have a great voice or a trained voice, you don't really have to be fancy about this but you do want to actually really try to sing for reals when you're trying to find out where your register is. Just going probably isn't going to help you really determine your range. To be comfortable with singing out. Yeah, so singing out with really making some noise. So we're going to listen to her voice and figure out where her break is and where she transits into different kinds of vocal placement. So let's start with maybe here, yeah? Yeah. So she's going to start with an mm and then open it to an aah. The reason for that is because if you're humming the tone, you can more here the center of the pitch and know exactly where your voice is and place it better, and then opening sound up with an eye after that to get the right tone on, it is good. So let's start at D. Okay. You here a little graininess in her voice. That's hard. So there's what we call the break and you can here there her voice actually broke and that's why it's called a break. Yeah. So here break is at B. So let's sing it in what we call MIT which is a mixture of chest voice and falsetto. Let's go back to B-flat just so they can hear the difference in the voice. So you mixed there, that's a mixed voice. Oh you want me to sing? Yeah. I'm sorry. Okay. So you can hear the difference in the tone of the voice and the mix has a softer and more modulated quality. Every voice has a break in the middle and for men when it breaks into the falsetto, they call it, and if you don't understand what that is about in your own voice, one way to just find it is to just sing. There's like a place where your voice is going to flip naturally when you just rise up like that, and that's the break that we're talking about. So that break is the place where we change into a different kind of voice. If you want your song to be really comfortable range where you can use your whole chest, you're going to want to set it so that the highest note is that near the top but not necessarily at the top. A lot of people do plays the voice at the very pinnacle of what it can do, and that's partly to make it feel more urgent, and like a little bit harder. You can hear the singer straining to make the note. But most singers wanting to be in a comfort zone. So we're going to work on Apollo Nicole song, I don't want to wait. This melody starts on the third and it starts on the one chord as Sarah just pointed out. So I don't want to wait. So she's going to be singing I don't want to wait, and the highest note goes up to the fifth. Right. So let's just try singing that first phrase for my life to be over in a couple of different keys and see if we can figure out what the best key is. So I'm going to actually start again on D. Okay. Sounds so nice on that lives, doesn't? A is such a happy, happy note for me.. You're comfortable there? Yes So let's try to see what happens when we press U up a little bit. Ones even better. All right, so let's try one more. So we're going to get to the key of E. Now this is where the high note here is on her break. Right. I don't want to wait for her lives to be over. I don't think unless you want to try to lip in the mix there. Now, maybe if we went higher, you might have a stronger mix because right on the brake is usually a weak point. But to me, it sounds like you the most comfortable in E-flat. Yeah. Or D. So this decision of whether to put it in D or E-flat really rests a lot with both the producer and the music where the music sounds better because key sound different. Right. Even not notwithstanding where your vocal comfort is, that E-flat sounds really different than D. Every key has a different emotion and a different timbre, and you have to look at what you're saying in the song and the prosody in connection with that, and the key is important. So we would have to make that decision based on a bunch of other elements, but the one thing we might want to look at is the low notes because the second half of this melody has the low part. Because you got to look at the low notes as well as the high notes and make sure it's all singable for you, right? Yeah. So let's try that on the E-flat. Okay. You can hear it does go pretty low. So let's try D just to make sure that if you decide to do it in D, you can sing it down there. That's about as low as we would want to go. Yeah. We wouldn't want to go that low. So seems like D or E-flat are the two most likely keys for Sarah. So that should help a little bit in terms of helping you figure out where to put it. You can experiment, sometimes you want to go into falsetto as an example in that radio head song. Don't leave me high. So we want the voice to break there. If we place that inside of our range, if I say, for example, don't leave me high, it doesn't sound as vulnerable as we want it to sound. Right. So sometimes flipping into falsetto is a stylistic choice that you want to make it. So every single one of these, it isn't that there's a right or wrong way, it's just be sure that you understand your voice and what you want for the song, and then make that decision based on your own voice and try pushing yourself a little thing in terms of what you're singing. If you're choosing between two keys like D and E-flat, other factors might come into play like the guitar players not as comfortable in E-flat as they might be in D. They're going to change their way that they're playing the chords and the voicings. So that's also something that is a consideration in the process of making these decisions. Myself I like to choose the key that's right for my voice first and everything else will just figure itself out, but it's true that some open chords are not playable in certain keys. They are not replicable. Right. Yeah. So that's something to pay attention to because that's going to change the resonance and the overall sound of the song. So that should help you find your vocal sweet spot.
