Last week we talked about why changing the key of a song is so important for your singing health and confidence. In this episode of Vocal Tips in 10, we get practical — diving into the how.
I’ll walk you through simple steps to figure out your best key every time, so you can stop straining on high notes (or getting buried on low ones) and instead sing with freedom and consistency. You’ll also hear about some of my favorite tools and resources — from apps and websites to karaoke tracks and capos — that make changing keys easy for any singer.
Inside this episode, you’ll learn:
00:00 The Importance of Key Changes in Singing
00:00 Understanding Your Vocal Range
02:07 Finding Your Sweet Spot
05:16 Tools for Key Transposition
09:05 Personalizing Your Singing Experience
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hi everybody. Last week I shared an episode where I talked about the many benefits and importance of changing the key of a song to best fit your voice. Everything from a healthier voice, better vocal longevity, to just a better performance. And I got a lot of questions from you all and DMs from that episode. And the biggest questions came from singers saying, this is great, but how do I find the right key? How do I know the key?
that's best for my voice. So that's what I wanna talk about today. One of the things that I think can be the most confusing about this for singers that are wonderfully talented singers and who love it, but don't necessarily have a music theory background, and that is A-okay, is that a lot of singers think, okay, well, my key is A-flat, and that is the key that I always sound best in. But we can't just rely on that because it completely depends on how the song is written.
Keys are movable. We call it movable, Do So think like Sound of Music. Do, a deer, a female deer. That just means the first note in the key, which is what do is, is movable. C can be anywhere. It can start on any note. It can be multiple octaves high, multiple octaves low. Every key can be anywhere. It all depends on the particular song, how it's written.
where the writer put the song in a particular range. So we can't count on specific keys because they can move What you want to focus on when you try to find the right key for you is really what is your happy place range-wise. So that's what I recommend first and foremost that singers do. What really is your range?
And so I like to kind of an aside just to know what is my highest high note, what is my lowest low note so I can kind of have a good idea of all the notes and the range that I have access to. But that's not necessarily where I'm the most comfy. Most of us do not want to sing a song that lives at our tip tip top or at our very, very bottom, right? the absolute extremes of how far we can stretch. Usually it's a few notes below that, a few notes above that.
So a great thing as a singer to just know what is your comfy range? What are the range of notes? What's the highest to the lowest that you feel really good about? And then to know your sweet spot, the place in your voice where you just sound and feel the absolute best. Once you know that, then you can take a particular song. And what I want you to do first is find the highest note in the song.
Make sure it is in your range and something that you can do. You can produce the sound in whatever way you want to produce it. Meaning, if the highest note you want it to be big and powerful, make sure that's doable for you. If you want it to be light and agile, whatever it is you're looking for,
then you go to the lowest note in the song, make sure that note is in your range and make sure that you can deliver it in the way that you want it to sound. Then we really want to look at Where does the song sit most of the time? It very likely is not going to be the highest high note or the lowest low note. So where is the range of notes?
where you are going to spend most of the time as a singer. And you wanna make sure wherever that is that it feels and sounds really good. The other thing that you wanna think about is you might put it in a spot that feels really good and feels really easy, but when you do that, the song loses the quality that it needs. So what do I mean by that? Take a song like an Adele song, right? Someone like you and the chorus needs to be big and powerful.
If I drop that song multiple notes, it will be easy peasy for me to sing that chorus, but it will sound boring. It won't have the resonant energy that it needs to have to sound how it should sound. So when you're trying to find the right key for your voice,
We want to find the key where you feel the best and you sound the best. Those are always my two rules If you have listened to me or followed my work in any way, you know the two questions I am always asking singers. Does it feel good? Is it something you can do consistently?
And then do you like how it sounds? Both of those two things are super important. And those are the two things I want you to think about when you're finding the right key for your voice in a song. So first, does it feel good? Can I hit the highest high note? Can I hit the lowest low note? And do I feel comfortable and like I can deliver consistently at my highest level, whatever that is for me, in the majority of this song, where this song lives throughout the song?
And then number two, does it sound as good as it can sound? Keeping in mind that one, I still have to be able to hit the pitches. So I might be like, hey, I can't hit that high note in any kind of a powerful way without really dropping it. And then it definitely loses something. It sounds kind of boring, but I don't really have a choice. So that's when I would say, probably that's not the best song for you.
Like if you can and you have time, let's just put that song aside, continue to work on it and choose something that does really fit your voice right now and really shows it off. But if you can hit those notes and they feel comfortable, then we wanna look at where can I move it where it feels good and it also sounds really good. The song doesn't lose anything. In fact, what I'm always looking for is I want it to gain something.
and gain something, meaning if I've got a song that is too high for me or too low for me, and I try to push it anyway, you are going to hear either strain at the top or the sound swallowed at the bottom, or maybe where it lives is a kind of just a muddy sort of not very resonant spot in my voice, no matter how good my technique is. That's not gonna be a great performance for you. It's not gonna feel great for me.
That's one of the things I think really that confuses people when you talk about changing the key. When you say, yes, all major singers, when they're out on tour, because they're humans and they have a human instrument and the human body, so therefore the voice, because the voice is the instrument.
can change depending on what you've got going on in life, how you're feeling, how stressed you are, how much sleep you've gotten. If you are a singer or any kind of voice user, you know this to your bones. It's just the reality for all of us. And I think people who are not singers are like, ⁓ great, the song's gonna be worse then. And that's just not the case. For you to deliver the song like they expect, it has to be in the right spot for your voice.
So I hope that helps you really kind of figure out how you can find the best keys for you. And then the next question I got was, okay, well, I don't play an instrument. I don't play guitar. If you do, y'all, the capo is your best friend. Get that capo. I spent 26 years in Nashville. Nashville is the land of the capo. I don't know what I would do without it.
But if you don't play any instruments and you don't have a band that's backing you and you are at home thinking, okay, I really want to sing this song. I know I need to switch the key. I think I've found the key that feels good for me, but what do I do? Like I don't, there's not a track to play with. I'm going to give you a handful of resources.
These are just ones kind of I use a lot or singers I work with use a lot. One, Apple has an app called iReal Pro,
It has lots of charts on it. lets you change the key. It can be really, really helpful. It's a great one to check out. I just learned about an app called Moises. I think I'm saying this correctly. M-O-I-S-E-S. And I heard about it from one of my Vocal Pro members and he was raving about it. So I went and checked it out. It can do really cool things. It can remove vocals from anything. You can change the key. It will let you see what the chords look like. I think it's like $7 a month.
and you can use it unlimited. There's also a website with an AI that someone created that is very cool and helpful. The website is vocalremover.org.org. all of these links for the apps and the different sites are gonna be down in the show notes. I use vocalremover.org a lot. So one, as you probably can guess from the name, you can remove vocals from anything, but you can do more than that. ⁓
which lets you move the key up or down and doesn't really dramatically change the quality.
It also lets you switch the BPMs, speed it up and slow it down. Moises does that as well. I'm not sure about iReal Pro. I'd have to check that out. Then another site that just has karaoke tracks, sing-along tracks, which for some of you might be exactly what you're looking for, it's karaokeversion.com. They are cheap. They are good quality.
I'm not a big fan of background vocals on karaoke tracks. That is just my own bias. I think they sound pretty cheesy. So I take those suckers out. You can do that, but you can change the key. Up or down, think four keys, maybe more than that. Again, this is all gonna depend on you, what works for you. And these are just a handful of tools. There are so many more. I work with singers in the Vocal Pro membership that I know use Smule.
I don't know anything about it. They love it. And there's so many more out there. these are tools that let you change the key, try it in different keys and just see what feels and sounds best for you. And I'm just going to leave you all with that guys. When we're talking about anything, when we're talking about the best key for your voice, when we're talking about technique, when we're talking about artistry, when we're talking about health, it always is going to come down to how it feels in your
body and in your voice and how does it sound? And those are the two questions you need to always ask yourself. If you can say yes to both of those, you are good to go. I hope this is helpful. Like always, I got a bunch of freebies for you guys because I like you.
Thank you for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye!
