What key am I singing in?

How to find out what key you're singing in

Tap the button and sing one line of the song for seven seconds, a verse or the chorus, ideally a line that ends where the tune feels finished. Your line plays back over the home chord of the key it heard, and the key shows above it with how sure the tool is. Below are the notes it heard, how long you stayed on each, and the key's chords. Sing with no music playing. To read the recording's key instead, play it on headphones and sing along: the phone hears only you, and you are in the recording's key. On your own you pick a key without noticing, often not the original, and that is the key this page names.

Next to the answer stands a runner-up, always its relative key: C major and A minor use the same seven notes, only the home note differs, so a line can fit both. Tap each one. Your line plays over that key's home chord, and over one of them it sounds finished. If the split is close to half and half, sing the line through to the end of its phrase, where the tune comes to rest, instead of stopping mid-phrase.

The key's chords, and moving it to suit your voice

Every major and minor key has seven chords, one on each note of its scale. The first, fourth and fifth (I, IV, V in major; i, iv, v in minor) carry most songs; they are outlined, so a guitar or a piano can start there. In minor the tool shows the natural minor's chords, and many minor songs swap the minor v for a major V (E instead of Em in A minor): try both. If the line sits too high or too low for you, move it with − and +, up to six semitones either way. The key, the chords, the playback and the line that goes into the app move with it.

Getting a clear answer

Sing at least five different notes: fewer can't pin a key down, and the answer leans towards a close call. One note held long says nothing about a key, and a scale sung up and down shows the notes but not which one is home unless you end on it. A real tune works best. Hum or sing on "la", close to the phone, in a quiet room. Notes shown faded fall outside the key: a passing note, a blue note, or a bit of drift. Unless the song changes key, one key covers all of it, so seven seconds of one line are enough.

How to find the key of a song by ear, without an app

1. Find home. Home is the note that sounds finished, the tonic. In most songs the melody's last note is home and the last chord is built on it; if the song fades out, use the end of the chorus. Hum that note under the song: it sits comfortably under most of it and only rubs against a few chords.
2. Name it. Match it on a piano or a keyboard app, or sing it into What note am I singing?
3. Major or minor. From home, sing up the first three notes of the scale, do re mi. If the third note is four semitones above home, the key is major; three semitones, minor. Major usually sounds brighter and minor darker, but plenty of sad songs are in a major key, so trust the third, not the mood.

From sheet music, the key signature (the sharps or flats at the start of each line) narrows it to two keys, a major and its relative minor: no sharps or flats means C major or A minor, one sharp G major or E minor, one flat F major or D minor. The last note and the last chord say which of the two. Each of the 24 keys has its own page with its scale and chords, from C major to A minor.

Can it find the key of a recorded song?

Not from the recording itself. A mixed song plays chords, bass and drums at once, and this tool follows one voice, so it can't read a full mix. What works: sing or hum the tune along with the song and it reads the key from your line, or drop a file with one voice in it (a vocal stem, a bass line, a one-note sample) on the key finder. For the key of a full mix you need a reader made for chords: Mixed In Key and Rekordbox analyse your files, Tunebat lists released songs, and even they now and then name the relative major or minor instead.

Is there an app that tells you what key you're singing in?

This page does it in the phone's browser, with nothing to install and no account: the microphone opens on the tap, closes after seven seconds, and your voice never leaves the phone. Pitch monitors and tuners, such as What note am I singing? and the pitch detector, show the note you are on right now, which is how to find your voice's pitch, but not the key. To find the key of a recorded song, sing or hum its melody here; the tool reads one voice, not a mix with chords and drums. To hear chords under a tune you hum, use Chords for my melody.

What key should I sing a song in?

The right key is the one where the song's highest and lowest notes both land inside your comfortable range. A key isn't male or female; a range is. Nor does a singer have one key of their own: songs span different ranges, so the key that suits you changes from song to song, and your range is what stays the same.

1. Find your comfortable range with the vocal range test: the notes you can sing easily, not the extremes.
2. Find the song's highest note, usually in the chorus, and its lowest, often in the first verse. Sing each into What note am I singing?, or read them off the sheet music.
3. Count the semitones between the song's top note and your comfortable top. Two over means two down: move the key down two semitones, then check the lowest note still sounds.
4. If the song spans more than your range, set the key so the high notes fit. A low note can be sung quietly; a high note out of reach strains every chorus.
5. Move the chords with Transpose chords. On a guitar a capo raises the key one semitone per fret; a karaoke key button usually moves it one semitone per press.

The tool above works the other way round: sing a song where it feels comfortable, read the key you chose, and play the chords in that key.

Singing a song written for the other voice

Men's and women's voices pair up about an octave apart: tenor with soprano, baritone with mezzo-soprano, bass with alto. A tenor's usual range, C3 to C5, is a soprano's, C4 to C6, an octave down. So a man usually sings a woman's song an octave lower, and a woman sings a man's an octave higher, in the same key. If that lands too low or too high, move the key from there by a few semitones. Some men find the verses of men's songs too low and women's songs an octave down a better fit; that says where their voice sits, nothing more.

The bands are the usual choir ones and overlap a lot; many voices sit between two. C4 is middle C, and the hertz are equal temperament from A4 = 440 Hz.

Is C5 high for a girl? Is F3 low?

C5, the C above middle C at 523 Hz, is the top of a tenor's usual range, in the upper part of an alto's and the middle of a soprano's. Sung lightly in head voice most women reach it; belted in chest voice it is high for most and takes training. F3, at 175 Hz, is the floor of the usual alto range and below where most sopranos and mezzos sound full. Women who sing it with a full tone are usually altos or contraltos, though a low mezzo can too; voice type rests on where the voice sits comfortably, not on one note. The alto part is common in any choir; the true contralto, the lowest classical female voice, is the rare one. Where yours sits: the voice type test.

Singing in key and singing in tune

Singing in key means your notes belong to the song's scale. Singing in tune means each note lands close to its exact pitch: most listeners start to hear a miss of about a tenth of a semitone (10 to 15 cents), and Can I sing in tune? counts a note within 25 cents, a quarter of a semitone, as in tune. You can be in the right key and flat on every high note, or perfectly in tune in a key that clashes with the band; "off-key" is said of both. This page checks the first: notes outside the key show faded. For the second, that test plays five notes and measures how close you land, and How to sing in tune says what to practise.

How the tool works out the key

The reader turns your voice into notes, each with a pitch and a length. The tool adds up the time you spent on each of the twelve notes (a long note counts up to 1.2 seconds, the last note half again, because lines tend to come home) and compares that profile with the pattern of each of the 24 major and minor keys. The patterns come from listening experiments by Carol Krumhansl and Edward Kessler (1982), who asked listeners how well each note fits a key: the home note fits best, then the fifth and the third, then the rest of the scale, the five notes outside it least. The key whose pattern matches yours best is the answer: the Krumhansl–Schmuckler key-finding method, set out in Carol Krumhansl's book Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (1990). An ear does much the same: the note a tune circles and returns to is home.

What it can't tell. A song that changes key gives the key of the line you sang. A modal tune, Dorian or Mixolydian, is named as the nearest major or minor key. A five-note tune leaves it open: C D E G A belongs to C, F and G major alike, so end on the note that feels like home: the tool counts the last note half again, which usually tips the answer towards it.

Then make something of it

The first two bars of your line go into Brumm as a melody, in time, inside a club track with a beat and a bass. The app follows your melody's key, so the chords fit what you sang. No account, no upload: the line travels inside the link itself.

Your voice stays on your phone: the tool reads it in the browser and keeps nothing. How the site counts visits.