Help & FAQ — DailyVocal
How to use DailyVocal: choosing your voice type, what each of the eight practice phases trains, setting up your microphone, and answers to common questions about daily singing practice.
What voice type am I?
Sing your lowest comfortable note, then your highest, and compare the span against the six standard types — soprano (C4–C6), mezzo-soprano (A3–A5), contralto (F3–F5), tenor (C3–C5), baritone (G2–G4), bass (E2–E4). Range alone cannot settle it: teachers classify on where a voice sits comfortably, its timbre and where it changes gear, and an untrained singer usually cannot reach their own extremes yet, so a measured range comes out narrower than the real one. Treat any answer as a starting point that decides which octave to practise in, not a verdict on what you can sing.
Take the range test — no account, about twenty seconds
How do I know if I am singing in tune?
You cannot tell reliably from inside your own head: you hear your own voice partly through the bones of your skull, which is why recordings sound wrong to you and normal to everyone else. The two honest checks are a recording of yourself against the original, and a pitch meter that reads the note you are actually producing and tells you how many cents sharp or flat it is. A hundred cents is a semitone; under about twenty-five cents will read as in tune to most listeners.
Sing four notes and see how close you get
Am I tone deaf?
Almost certainly not. Congenital amusia — genuine, measurable difficulty telling pitches apart — affects a small minority of people, and the usual estimate is around one in twenty-five. Nearly everyone who says they are tone deaf can hear perfectly well that a note is wrong; what they cannot yet do is make their voice land on the note they are hearing, which is a motor skill and improves with practice in a way that hearing does not need to.
Find out in a minute — a note plays, you sing it back
How long should I warm up before singing?
Five to fifteen minutes, depending on what follows it. Two minutes of breathing and gentle humming is enough before light practice; a rehearsal or a performance deserves longer, working from quiet humming through lip trills and sirens into full voice. What matters more than the length is the order: start below full volume, keep everything in the middle of your range at first, and never begin with the loudest or highest thing you plan to sing.
A guided warm-up, timed, with a sung example for every exercise
How often should I practise singing?
Most days, for a short time, beats one long session a week. Singing is a motor skill, and motor skills respond to how often you repeat something far more than to how long you repeat it in one sitting — twenty minutes daily will move your voice further than two and a half hours on Sunday, and the daily version survives a bad week where the weekly appointment does not. Practising every day is fine for the voice as long as you keep it inside a comfortable range and warm down afterwards.
Can I practise singing without a piano or a teacher?
Yes, for the parts that need a reference pitch and a routine — scales, sustained notes, interval training and warm-ups all work from a played reference, and a browser can play one as well as a piano can. What you lose without a teacher is diagnosis: nobody is telling you that the tension you cannot hear is in your jaw. A reasonable compromise is to work daily on your own and take an occasional lesson to check nothing has gone wrong.
Play a scale sung on a vowel, not beeped
Why does my voice crack on high notes?
A crack is usually the vocal folds losing their grip as the mechanism changes between chest and head voice — often because the note was approached by pushing harder rather than by letting the folds thin. Sliding through the break slowly on a lip trill or a siren, quietly, teaches the transition better than attacking the note does. If it is a new problem rather than a familiar one, check whether you are tired, dehydrated, or unwell before treating it as technique.
Why do I run out of breath halfway through a phrase?
Usually not because you took too little air in, but because too much of it escapes at the start of the phrase. The measurable version of this is how long you can spin out one steady hiss on a single breath: twenty seconds is a reasonable target, and getting there is a matter of releasing the air evenly rather than of breathing in harder. Breathing low and wide rather than lifting the shoulders is the other half.
Is DailyVocal free, and do I need to download anything?
It is free and it runs in a browser — there is nothing to download and no payment. The voice-type test, the scale player and the pitch test all work with no account at all. An account, which is a free sign-in with Google, exists so the routine can keep the record: your voice type, what you practised, and whether it is getting better.
Does the microphone record what I sing?
No. The exercises that need a microphone read the pitch of your voice in the browser as you sing, and nothing else — no audio is recorded, stored, or sent to any server. That is why the pitch tools work with the tab open and stop the moment you leave the page, and why the browser stops showing the microphone indicator when you do.