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I'm not a really experienced singer, so I tried to find my vocal range and I cannot go above C5 without going into my falsetto. If i push myself hard enough I can get a really rough B4 but I literally cannot go into C5 without going into my falsetto. It's super annoying because I can't sing 95% of the songs I listen to (Also, I have a really good voice and I really want to become a singer) - It's just my dumb vocal range holding me back :/. I'm 16, male.

this causes really big problems when I sing, for example when im singing a song and the notes suddenly spike up, my transition from normal voice to falsetto voice is just so ugly and rough.

what do i do?

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    What to do? Change the keys of the songs. If you can't sing along with a track, you can't do it. I can't run as fast as Usain, so I don't go running with him! Changing key is what singers need to do to even get a good recording done - they find a key in which every note sounds good.
    – Tim
    Jul 12, 2017 at 5:36
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    Do you mainly listen to songs sung by men or ladies? A man trying to keep singing pace with the ladies is on a futile quest, I believe. The ladies will sing too high too often for the men...
    – Dekkadeci
    Jul 12, 2017 at 13:33

3 Answers 3

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I'm no expert, but that sounds like a perfectly normal tenor range to me. What singers are you listening to?

You could try transposing to another key, or singing in the same key but down an octave, or adjusting the melody line to avoid the high notes.

Do whatever sounds good and doesn't hurt.

There are plenty of great singers with ranges more limited than yours.

If you have the opportunity for a voice teacher, take it. It'll be fun and you'd probably learn a lot even from only a few lessons. Compared to any of us, they'll be able to give you much better answers to any questions about your voice.

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  • How much can a voice teacher enhance the range? Sep 10, 2017 at 14:59
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    @marcellothearcane you're asking to quantify what ought to be a personal experience, for whom results differ
    – psosuna
    Sep 12, 2017 at 0:37
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B4 in the modal voice is an incredibly difficult note to reach! Who are you listening to that goes higher than that? The big note in Nessun Dorma is a B4 for Christ's sake! I consider myself very lucky to have the vocal range I have, I've got a decent tenor range that covers me for everything I want to sing. And despite that, there's no way I'm hitting a C5 in my modal voice, not even CLOSE!

Perhaps what you really need to work on is improving the quality of your falsetto register: if you don't use it all that much when you sing then it's probably quite weak: you don't use that part of your voice often when you speak, so it rarely gets used at all. You need to practice singing in your falsetto so that you feel fully in control of both of your vocal registers. You also want to train the low end of your falsetto, so that you have as much overlap between your 2 vocal registers as possible.

You need to give yourself the physical tools to make the best performance choices about how you sing a passage that you know will at some point end up in your falsetto range: choose the point at which you transition based on what makes sense musically, rather than just going up and up until you run out of modal voice and then "making do with falsetto". And, similarly, if you know a certain passage will bring you into your falsetto range, you need to consider how much "power" you're going to give the modal voice notes leading up to it, in order that the falsetto notes don't seem underwhelming.

This answer applies less to classically trained opera singers, who I believe rarely use falsetto, and also have a very different singing technique that functionally maximises the range physically possible from a singer.

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You need to find your range, and be comfortable with it. Tenor tesituras are less common, actually, and are very desirable. Also, careful practice/warmup can allow you to "stretch" your range, but make sure you aren't straining because that could cause damage to your voice.

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