When singers join a non-auditioned choir, they are usually expected to choose the voice part that suits them — without any help.
Over time, singers in community choirs can begin to wonder if they’ve chosen the right part. Here’s a simple way of carrying out a vocal range test with the whole choir.
In open-access community choirs, the emphasis is on community and fun music-making. It can feel rather intimidating to be asked to sing solo in front of your choir leader so they can assess which voice part you belong to.
Here is an alternative which involves the whole choir, is more like a game, and can be fun (and surprising).
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Get your singers to stand in a long line with the highest voices at one end,
through the middle voices, down to the lowest voices at the other. Let’s say
the sopranos are on the left of the choir leader, and the basses on their
extreme right. So, for any singer, higher voices will be to their right and
lower voices to their left.
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Start off by teaching everyone a very simple, short riff and get everyone to
sing it at pitch (I.e. everyone will be singing in the same octave).
Depending on your particular set of singers, a good place to start might be
the A below middle C.
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Shift the start note of the riff up a semitone and get everyone to sing it
again. If anybody finds this too high, but the person on their left still
finds it comfortable, then swap places.
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Repeat step 3 until nobody can reach the highest note. In this way, those
singers who can sing the highest notes will bubble up to the top, leaving
everyone else in roughly the right place for their vocal range.
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Then start the whole exercise again from the beginning. This time shift down
a semitone each time. If anybody finds this too low, but the person to their
right still finds it comfortable, then swap places.
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Repeat step 5 until nobody can sing the lowest note. In this way, the lowest
voices will bubble down to the bottom.
I’m assuming that you have a SATB choir and that each section sings in the same octave. If your choir is different, you can adapt this to suit you.
You might get some surprises.
I tried it once and a woman who usually sang down with the tenors discovered that she could sing higher than most of the sopranos. This meant that she then had more choices and could decide to sing different parts for different songs, keeping her whole range exercised.
Conversely, one of the sopranos discovered that she had an amazingly powerful, low, bluesy tenor voice. However, she thought that “proper” singing meant using her head voice. Unfortunately, that was always a bit screechy, but she preferred to sing with the tops nevertheless.
final thought
Exercises like this can help singers feel more confident about where they sit in the choir — without anyone feeling put on the spot. They remind us that voices are flexible, labels are approximate, and that community choirs work best when curiosity and playfulness are encouraged alongside good musicianship.
further reading
These two summaries, each of 5 posts, are all about vocal range: how it’s relevant to being in a choir and how you might go about finding where you fit:
Vocal range 1: 5 relevant reads
Chris Rowbury
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