One of the things I love most about my home church is that we are a singing church.

It’s one my greatest joys to look out and see hundreds of people—regardless of age or ability—lifting their voices and hands in praise of Almighty God.

This doesn’t always happen, though. In fact, if seeing exuberant singing brings me joy, it’s listlessness that “pops my balloon.” This is because either:

OR

It’s this second point that comes to mind, which I find to be the case, more often than the first.

For some of the music leaders reading this, you already know theory, music notation, and have a fairly good grasp of register. (I’ve written about this before; it would be good to review before reading ahead.) But for others, although you can play and sing well, you might be versed in these more formal parts of musical training.

And that’s OK! We’re going to dive into how you can “feel” out the right key of a song so your congregation can sing it confidently and LOUDLY!

Understanding Intervals and Range

The first thing to understand is intervals work, especially when it comes to how a melody moves from one note to the next.

To make it super simple, we have eight main intervals in a major scale:

In a given melody, the interval that spans the lowest note to the highest is called a range. Some songs can be small in their range, say, only a 5th. Others can be a full octave, an octave plus a 3rd, 4th, or 5th, or even all the way up to two octaves.

Knowing how intervals work within a framework of a range is crucial to choosing the right key for a song, as the expanse of that range is one of the make-or-breaks.

Let’s put this into practice—but we first have figure out where “home” is.

Finding “Home”

Remember “Do, Re, Mi” from The Sound of Music, or from your elementary music classes? It turns out that this song is super helpful in finding the “home” note of the key of a song. In this case, the “home” note is “do”—and this coincides with the solfège syllable of the same name in primary music theory.

The “home” note has the greatest sense of gravity of all the other notes. In fact, some of the other notes “want” to go back to “do/home.” Try this:

This is a good way to internalize the home note of a key. Now the next part is determining which note is “home” when it comes to a specific key, and this is where you chord chart comes into play.

Most publishers will indicate the key of a song at the top of the first page, somewhere in the header. Nearly all the time, what feels like “home” matches up with the letter name:

Easy, right?

Don’t be fooled—or even more specifically, don’t use this as a shortcut. It’s necessary to know the correlation between the written key and its “home” note, but it’s even more vital to feel where that home note lies.

And how this home note feels within the range of a song is crucial in your choice of where to place the key for your congregation.

“Ranging” Away from “Home”

OK—this is where we learn how an interval feels when we sing. To make it easy, we’ll use tunes you might already know (secular, CCM, and children’s songs), no piano needed!

Look up these examples, spend LOTS of time singing through them—GET THEM IN YOUR EAR!

Then, you’ll be ready to identify the intervals in the songs for your congregation.

Figuring Out the Song

Now that you are familiar with specific intervals, it’s time to tackle a song. We have three goals:

From there, we can choose a key (and perhaps, we may have to rearrange a few sections).

Let’s start with something like “Come Now Is the Time to Worship” by Brian Doerksen. Sing through the first section. The lowest note lands on “heart” and the last “come.”

How do those words “feel” in the key? If they feel like “home,” then congratulations! You’ve found the home note. (Keep track of this.)

Now, move to the second section where the melody goes up. The highest note arrives on the second half of the word “remains.” Hold out “-mains,” and then sing the last “come” from the previous section. “-mains” ALSO feels like home, right? That’s because it’s an octave above our main “home” note.

Let’s recap:

This means that the melody of this song spans exactly one octave, which tells us almost exactly where we can pitch it for the congregation!

Referring back to the vocal register post, most average singers can sing comfortably in one octave from middle C to one octave above, with a little bit of wiggle room below and above. For most congregations, “Come Now Is the Time to Worship” will work really well in the following keys:

For me, I choose to go with C most of the time because:

This is a fairly easy example, but what do we do with something that goes beyond an octave?

Going Beyond the Octave

When you have a song that goes beyond an octave in its range, you need to determine if:

OR

Two examples respective to each bullet come to mind: “Goodness of God” and “Never Gets Old.”

In the “Goodness of God,” the melody ranges an octave plus a 4th, and most of the sections are unique without any doublings. In fact, if you don’t sing the bridge in the way its arranged, then the “big moment” is missed, dynamically speaking. For this song, since it’s dynamically dependent on the wide range, I typically only pitch it in:

In the “Never Gets Old,” Verse 1 and Chorus 1 are exact octave doublings lowered from the respective verses and choruses that follow. In the recording, the range is an octave plus a 5th, but if you transpose Verse 1 and Chorus 1 up to be in the same octave as the rest of the song, then you only have the range of a 5th—which is very workable. The original song is in B-flat, which is both really high on the top end and really low on the bottom end for the average singer, but reducing to a 5th allows you bring it up to a comfortable key like:

A Cheat Sheet

Once you figure out the proper range of a song, you can use this rule of thumb to choose a key:

So let’s go with the recommendations based on common range types that allow for comfortable, robust singing:

From my experience, as you expand the range of a melody, you’re likely going to encounter some octave doublings. In that case, shift those sections to all be within the same register and adjust the key from there. If you absolutely have to perform a song that spans an octave plus a 5th, then you can disguise awkward/impossible registers by:

Big Picture

At the end of the day, the important thing is that your congregation is expressing themselves authentically. In some cases, that means they’re all matching pitch and there’s a big wall of sound. In others, parts of some songs might be out of their league, but they’ll still express their hearts in worship nonetheless. (Or, if they’re adept, they’ll find a harmony part!)

Still—if you’re stuck, just reach out. More than happy to help you figure it out!

Be blessed 👊✌️