How do you know what keys to sing in?

[Visconti]

I read in a book you should sing in your normal talking voice. I picked up a guitar and found I am speaking around a B flat. The book went on to say I can go up and down a step for the best keys to sing in.

Dose anyone agree with this?

[Masklin]

 

The key might correlate very weakly with what absolute frequencies a song requires of you, but my best guess, as an astrophysicist, is that this correlation is weak enough to be negligible.

 

So, no - the key has no bearing on how comfortable a particular song will sit for you, since melodies vary.

 

For example, if you want to sing your favourite song in chest voice only, and this song spans 2 octaves, there will typically be only one or two keys that you can choose from. These two keys are probably not the keys you'd have chosen if the song only spanned a single octave.

[davie]

When choosing the key of the song you should consider where the lowest and highest notes are and also where the majority of the notes lie. Like Masklin said, the composition is different for each song, so you have to choose the key with respect to its original key. Here's an easier way to look at it, if the majority of the notes are high and in the E4 to G4 range and your highest comfortable note is E4 then you should transpose the song's key by -3.

Also I'll have to disagree about singing in your speaking voice. Singing and speech are very different from each other. There's two main differences, singing uses more acoustical space and requires more energy.

What book did you read this from?

[ido1957]

I also question the logic, as I sing higher than my speaking voice.