If you’re a singer-songwriter—or if you write for your own band—your melodies will naturally be tailored to fit your own vocal range or that of your band’s lead singer. But if your aim is to get other artists to record your songs, it is important to make sure your melody lines don’t exceed the vocal range of the intended singers. For example, if you have to break into falsetto when you sing the song yourself, it’s a sign that the melody range may be too wide.
A singer’s vocal range is often defined as the total span of “musically useful” pitch- es that he or she can produce. In other words, if the lowest notes are barely audible when the artist sings them, and the highest notes crack and can’t be sustained, then they aren’t “musically useful”.
The maximum range for most singers is rarely more than one and a half octaves (in many cases it’s an octave plus a couple of notes). So if your song has a much greater melodic span than that, you may be limiting the number of artists who could sing the song comfortably.
Remember, successful artists who don’t write their own material are constantly being bombarded with new songs. Because they have so many to choose from, they’re unlikely to go for a song that they find difficult to sing (especially live)—no matter how much they like it.
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