How to sing in tune: find the step where it slips.

Why am I off key? What each step tells you

The big steps in step 1 are hard.

That's rare, and it's the one case where singing practice should wait. Play Higher or lower for five minutes a day first, and take the tone-deaf test once; the singing comes after. Missing only the tiny steps is normal: trained singers miss those too.

Steps 1 and 2 are fine, 3 or 4 are off.

The most common case, and the most practisable one. Your ears work; your voice hasn't learnt to follow them yet. It's coordination, like learning to throw at a target, and it gets better with short, regular goes.

You start on the note and slide away.

Usually breath. The note sags flat as the air runs out at the end of a line, or climbs sharp when you push. Shorter phrases, a steady vowel, a little less volume. Hold a note draws the drift as a line over eight seconds.

Fine alone, lost with the track.

Step 5 is its own skill: with music around you, you hear yourself less. Sing a little under the track's volume, not a whisper, or keep one earphone out so your own voice reaches you.

Five exercises for singing in tune

• Hear it before you sing it. Play the note, let it finish, sing it once in your head, then start. Teachers call this pre-hearing: the voice sets itself up before the sound comes, so you aren't correcting afterwards.
• Hum first, then open. An "mm" finds the note with less effort than an "ah". Hum against the note and listen: when you're on it, the two sounds blend and stop wobbling. Then open into "ah" or "oh" without moving the pitch.
• Slide in, then land. Start a little below the note and siren up slowly until it sounds right. Then the bullseye: go slightly above on purpose, come back down and hear yourself tune in. Once that works, start straight on the note, no scoop.
• Sing against a held note. Let a tone ring (a key held down, or the tone generator) and hum with it. Close but off, the two wobble against each other; in tune, the wobble stops and your voice almost disappears into the tone.
• Three notes, then a line. Do-re-mi up and down (C, D, E), landing each note cleanly. Then a song one line at a time, slowly: in a study of occasional singers, most came much closer to the professionals' accuracy once they slowed down (Dalla Bella, Giguère and Peretz, 2007).

Seven days, ten minutes a day

Each day starts with two minutes of lip trills and a slow siren from low to high and back, so the voice moves freely before you aim it (vocal warm-ups). Nothing here is saved, so write down what you got on day one. Day seven is the same test again.

1. Day 1 · Where you start

   Steps 1 to 4, once each. Write down the smallest step you caught in Higher or lower and your score in Can I sing in tune. Then three minutes of humming one comfortable note.

2. Day 2 · One note

   What note am I singing: hum, then open, on the same comfortable note five times. Aim for the same cents each time, not for zero.

3. Day 3 · Slides

   Slide up into that note from below, five times, then the bullseye from above, then sing it straight. Then the same with a note two steps higher.

4. Day 4 · Match

   Can I sing in tune, one round. Replay the pairs you missed and hear which way you were off; the result says whether you lean flat or sharp.

5. Day 5 · Three notes

   Do-re-mi against a held tone, up and down. Then two rounds of step 4, humming each note quietly before you sing it out.

6. Day 6 · A song

   One line of a song you know, in a key that suits you, slowly; check the first note before you start. Or hum two bars into Brumm over the beat, then sing the same line on top of it, quietly.

7. Day 7 · Again

   Steps 1 to 4 again, and compare with day 1. Whatever moved, keep doing that.

How to sing in key

In tune is about each note; in key is about the song. A key is the set of notes a song lives in, and the backing plays in it. You can sing every step of the melody right and still be out of key with the track, because you started on a different note. So take the first note from the music: find it on the instrument, or hum along with the intro until your note blends, before the first word. Then pick a key that fits your voice. A song made for a higher or lower voice than yours pushes you to the edge of your range, where pitch goes first. Find your comfortable notes with the vocal range test and move the song: a capo, the key button in a karaoke app, or the chords in transpose. One or two semitones often does it.

To know which key you're singing in, hum a bit of the song into the singing key finder and it names it. Choruses usually sit higher than verses; take the breath for them early. E3 (165 Hz) is low for most women: it sits near the bottom of a contralto's range, and many women's easy singing starts around A3 (220 Hz) or higher. For most men it is a comfortable low-middle note. The vocal range test shows where yours are.

In tune, flat or sharp: what the numbers mean

Pitch is measured in cents: a hundred to a semitone, twelve hundred to an octave. Flat means under the note, sharp means over it. Can I sing in tune counts within 25 cents as in tune and within 50 as close; past 50 the next semitone is nearer. A whole octave off is not out of tune: a man singing a woman's note an octave lower is on it, and the matching tools here accept any octave.

The tools read pitch, nothing else. They don't judge your voice, its sound, or whether you should sing, and a teacher hears things a phone can't. A week helps most people some; nobody can promise how much. If your voice hurts or goes hoarse, stop for the day.

How do you know if you're singing in tune?

Not from inside your head. Part of your voice reaches your ears through the bones of the skull, which carry the low frequencies best, so you hear yourself darker and fuller than anyone else does. That's why a recording sounds strange at first: it is closer to your real voice than what you hear while singing.

• Record yourself singing with a reference note or the song, then listen back. Is your note under it, over it or on it?
• Listen for the wobble. Two tones a few hertz apart pulse at the difference: A3 at 220 Hz against 223 Hz beats three times a second, about 23 cents apart. The slower the pulse, the closer you are; no pulse, in tune.
• Read it live. What note am I singing? shows the note and the cents while you sing. Use it as a mirror, then sing without looking.
• Test it in a minute. Can I sing in tune? plays five notes and gives each one's cents.

Is there an app that tells you if you sing in tune?

Any chromatic tuner app shows the note and whether you're under or over it; the tools on this page do it in the phone's browser, free, with nothing installed or kept. Use it as a mirror while you learn, then sing without looking.

Do real singers use Auto-Tune?

On records, often. Pitch correction such as Antares Auto-Tune (sold since 1997) and Melodyne is a normal part of studio production, usually set so nobody notices. Comparing your take with a finished record compares you with an edited voice. On stage, many acts also run pitch correction live, and nearly all rely on monitors and in-ear mixes so they can hear themselves: step 5, solved with gear.

Why you go flat or sharp

Nerves and tiredness make all of these worse, and so does a tight jaw, neck or shoulders. Shake out your arms and shoulders, yawn, start again.

Singing in tune with a piano, a guitar or a song

An instrument gives you a fixed note to check against. Tune it first, to A4 = 440 Hz (the guitar tuner does it): an out-of-tune guitar teaches the wrong note. Then pick a starting note in the easy middle of your voice. Many lower voices are comfortable around C3 to A3 (131 to 220 Hz), many higher voices around A3 to D4 (220 to 294 Hz). Play it and let it ring, hear it in your head, hum, slide in if you need to, open to "ah", then play it again while you hold it to check.

On a guitar, one plucked string is easier to match than a strummed chord. With a song, choose something simple you know well, find its first note, sing one line and check, then two lines, then the verse. No instrument: the tone generator plays any note and holds it as long as you need.

Am I tone deaf? Can anyone learn to sing in tune?

Real tone deafness, congenital amusia, is rare: about 1.5% of some 20,000 people tested online (Peretz and Vuvan, 2017). Far more people sing out of tune, somewhere between 10% and 20% of adults, and most of them hear pitch normally (Pfordresher and Brown, 2007; Larrouy-Maestri, University of Liège, 2013). Larrouy-Maestri's thesis sorts the problems into four kinds: hearing the pitch, remembering the tune, turning what you hear into a move of the voice, and controlling the muscles that make it. The steps at the top test them in roughly that order.

So most people can learn to sing more in tune: for most, the ear already works and the coordination is trainable. How fast differs from person to person, and short daily practice beats a long session now and then. To check your ear first, the tone-deaf test takes about three minutes. Starting from zero as an adult, with breath, range and a first song: how to start singing.

Teaching someone else, or a child

Same order: the ear first, with a higher-or-lower game, then single notes in their range, not yours. Copy their note first, then lead them one step away from it. Children usually match a child's or a woman's voice more accurately than a man's an octave below (Green, 1990, with primary-school children). For children there are games for this: echo singing and sing the note.

The two singing steps open the microphone only after a tap. It closes when you tap again (What note am I singing?, or by itself after half a minute of quiet) or after the five notes (Can I sing in tune?). Your voice is read in the browser and nothing is kept or sent. How the site counts visits.