Most songs that go badly were never going to go well. They were written for a voice that reaches somewhere yours does not, and no amount of practice on the night fixes that. Two minutes of checking beforehand changes which songs you attempt and how they turn out.
You need two notes: the lowest one you can sing and still be heard, and the highest one you can sing without straining. Not the extremes you can scrape at once, but the ones you could hold for a few seconds and repeat.
Sit at a piano app, or use any keyboard, and do this:
Write them down as note names. The numbers matter, so C3 and C4 are an octave apart. Most untrained voices land somewhere around an octave and a half. That is normal and it is enough for most songs.
Do it again on a different day before believing it. Range moves with sleep, with how much you have talked, and a great deal with how warmed up you are.
This is the part almost everybody gets wrong. A song's top note tells you very little. What matters is where the song spends its time.
A song that touches a high note once, on a word you could half-speak, is easier than a song that sits four semitones lower for three minutes without a break. Singers call the second thing tessitura, meaning the part of your range a piece lives in, and it is the better predictor of whether you will still have a voice at the end.
So a song is a good fit when its comfortable middle overlaps yours, and it merely visits the edges of your range. It is a bad fit when it lives at your edge, however modest its highest note looks on paper.
You can work this out by ear over a few attempts, or you can measure it. Homeoke measures it for you: on a song's first play it separates the original vocal out of the mix and reads the notes off it, then shows two things beside the lyrics.
C3 up to
F4.mostly A3: the
tessitura, which is the number to compare against your own comfortable middle.Beside the lyrics there is also a rail marked with note names and a marker showing the note being sung right now, so you can watch where a song lives rather than reading a summary of it.
Two honest caveats about the measurement. Brief peak notes are deliberately left out of the range it reports, on the grounds that one shriek should not make a song look impossible. That does mean a song with a single big climax can look easier than it is. And on tracks with thick backing harmonies the reading sometimes follows a harmony line rather than the lead.
Reading the notes off a recorded voice has one trap that catches every method: the octave. A sung note is really a stack of sounds, the note itself plus fainter copies at two, three and four times its frequency, and a program listening for the note can lock onto the copy at twice the frequency and report the note an octave too high. It is not an occasional glitch. On one of the songs Homeoke is tested against, the reader put a held note at B5 in 220 of its readings and at B4, the note actually sung, in 446. A third of those readings were a note nobody sang.
That is why the obvious fixes fail. You cannot throw out the rare notes, because the wrong ones are not rare, and you cannot keep only the confident ones, because the wrong ones are just as confident. What gave them away was when they happened: every false B5 sat in the middle of a phrase that was otherwise around B4. So Homeoke judges each note against the melody around it, and a note that jumps an octave out of its own phrase does not count as a new top note. Before that change the same song read C2 to C6, four octaves, which would put it out of anybody's reach. It now reads D4 to F5, and Let It Go reads F3 to D#5, the range published for it.
The same trap is worth knowing when you find your own range with a tuner app. If it says your top note was an octave higher than it felt, trust how it felt. The app heard one of the copies.
A song two semitones above your top is not out of reach; it is two semitones off. Shifting the key moves the whole thing down without changing its speed, and in Homeoke the range readout moves with it, so you can shift until the pair of notes it shows sits inside your own numbers, then sing it.
The one case this does not solve is a song that is simply wider than you are: a melody spanning two octaves will hang off one end or the other wherever you put it. Then the choice is which end to sacrifice. Usually keep the top, because the high notes are where the song's interest lives, and a lost bottom note can be sung an octave up or left out entirely without anyone minding.
Once a song is in the right key, what is left is usually a handful of specific moments: one phrase where you run out of breath, one interval you keep missing, one word that comes out flat. Homeoke lets you mark those phrases in the lyrics and tag them (breath here, head voice, don't rush), and the mark stays on that phrase every time you come back to the song, which is the difference between practising and just singing it again.
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