I’ve written a few articles that cover how the voice is built in a particular way, as well as worship leader vocal training. As a result of the way the voice is built, putting songs in certain keys can really wreak havoc on the correct operation of the voice. It’s therefore important to put songs in a key that, aside from actually sounding good, are not killing people’s voices.
Now, the majority of artists or performers (whether professional or amateur) outside of the church or corporate singing (e.g. choirs) don’t have to worry about the keys of their songs causing other people to strain or hurt their voices. They put the song wherever they like, and people usually just listen, or mumble along or shout out their favourite lines. No big deal. However, within certain contexts, there are people whose roles mean that their key choice is forced on those around them…
Worship Leaders
One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered with students coming to me from a background of being a worship leader, or from singing in church, is heavily ingrained bad habits. These bad habits are reinforced by hours and hours of singing songs in keys that is not appropriate for their voice, or those around them.
There are bridges in the voices, passageways (if used correctly) that connect different parts of the voices together. Singing right on a bridge or one note either side of it is harder than singing in the ‘island’ between these bridges. This means, if you can sing a song where the top notes are ‘on’ one of your bridges, it will always be easier to sing and sound better if you sing the song in a key where the top notes are placed ‘away’ from your bridges.
For the average singer, particularly males, it is possible-to-probable that they have not learned to move through their first bridge yet, and so you cannot put the song in a key where the notes are higher than first bridge (E4) and expect them to find that easy or even doable… yet worship leaders worldwide insist on placing songs in keys where the top note IS E4 or just slightly higher. I have regularly played with in bands with worship leaders who insist this is where their voice sounds best and that the song ‘lacks something’ if it is not put in this key. They themselves pull, strain and push to get to those notes, and expect the same of the congregation. Except that they have a microphone and PA behind them, the congregants do not.
Moving a song away from one of your bridges can help with singability and tonal quality no end. For example, if there is a song with a single top note of E4 in the key of E, simply moving it to the key of D places that single top note away from the bridge to D4. Or in another example, where the top note is a repeated or sustained top note, making it a C#4 or a C4 can make things soooo much easier for everyone.
This kind of approach makes songs much easier to sing and will actually make the worship leader AND congregation sound better, as the voice is more in balance and in less of a strained condition.
Not convinced? We’ve only looked at the issue of bridges affecting male singers. Let’s look at female singers.
Double or Quits
Many female singers find that they simply cannot sing men’s parts in the original octave, but also struggle to sing it in the octave above. They often revert to a harmony line, which allows them to sing somewhere in between the original octave and the upper one.
This is because if a top note is E4, the octave above is E5, which is right on their second bridge. This is tough. Even changing the key to make the top note D5 is still tough just because the higher you go, the more of a teetering tower of cards the voice can become without a decent level of vocal training. In such scenarios, placing the top note on a C#, C or B is recommended for women.
For the equivalent octave for men, this can sometimes feel a touch low, so I generally recommend D, C# or C as the top note. You can see there is a good deal of overlap there.
What’s wrong with harmony?
Absolutely nothing, but if people are having to change what they’re singing because the key isn’t sustainable for them, then I would argue the key is poorly chosen for corporate singing. I mentioned that female singers often revert to a harmony so as not to struggle with the melody. A harmony is just another melody that complements the original melody. It often closely mirrors the original melody.
What female singers learn to do is sing a harmony that sits more or less halfway between where two octaves of the melody would sit, i.e. if the top note is an E4 / E5 (depending on the octave), females often revert to around B4 to make it singable. This tells us a lot about the comfort zone of the female voice, and we would do well to take that into consideration.
So what do I suggest?
Worship leaders – if you get comments of ‘that was tough to sing’, if you find your own voice is shot after just a few songs, if you find that people drop out for the high notes or women are reverting to harmonies out of comfort, then you are killing people’s voices, including your own. Find better keys for your keys and you will find that people become far less distracted by the discomfort in their own throat during a worship time, and you’ll ALSO start getting a LOT more compliments on how good you sound.