https://www.quora.com/What-rock-singer-had-the-widest-vocal-range
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
now that everybody's had some fun with numbers, let's clarify something. Almost every rumor and reputation gigantically exaggerates the number of octaves.
Yma Sumac, lovely Peruvian lady who is often thought of as the grandma of world music, was famous for having the actual widest measured vocal range in history. she was the first Latin American woman to get a recording artist star on the Hollywood walk of fame. For a while, the rumors were that she had a five octave vocal range. She made Mariah Carey sound like Bob Dylan. Going over her recordings during her prime, her maximum range was 4 1/2 octaves.
no rock singer came anywhere near six octaves. Do you wanna do a little experiment? Find your favorite special effects singer (they might actually be a great singer, but I'm talking about the ones who can melt your face with a high tonal scream). you probably already know a couple of songs where they hit some impressive high notes. Decide if you are counting screaming in pitch, or if you're only counting notes that are part of a melody line or lyric. you can also decide whether you are counting falsetto, or a Mariah Carey whistle range.
If you can't tell where that note is in reference to middle C, see if you can find an app or a website that will tell you exactly what note you are hearing. You may have to look a little harder to find the lowest note they sing. Count how many notes there are between that lowest and the highest.
Write back when and if you ever find more than three octaves.
somebody somewhere was measured to have a six octave range. most of it didn't sound like music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
A singer with a very beautiful voice with tremendous strength and an actual "holy shit!" range was Tim Buckley. He was Jeff Buckley's dad, the one in the title of that movie with Penn Badgley and Imogen Poots. Jeff, the son, had a beautiful voice with a very wide range. His dad had a much wider and fuller range, reaching legitimately into the bass. But his high notes could be extremely emotional, stop you in your tracks, and he was able to either cover those gigantic intervals as part of a beautiful or strange melody, or as an emotional crescendo. He could do it as a chest or falsetto tone.
Roy Orbison had a beautiful voice with that famous high-end. Musical taste aside, Tim Buckley had a considerably wider and fuller range. Buckley had a really nice artsy folk rock album at 8:19, in 1966. He was briefly famous along with people like Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, that whole Venice Beach California folk rock scene. Two albums later he was doing jazzy, romantic, bleak and beautiful folk tunes with world class jazz musicians (Strange Feelin’ is Miles’ “All Blues”), and then two albums later, completely bizarre and possibly great event guard experimental albums in which he would use his voice as though it were several different instruments…. even splitting his voicve into tone and overtone (end of “Lorca”, the weird, pipe-organ, bass
if you can handle it, listen to the songs on the album "starsailor". 1970, about as progressive as progressive gets, with lots of jazz and and avantgarde classical mixed in. it's not an easy listen, but it's legit creative music with some incredible musicians, including my dear friend Lee Underwood. Had to give him a shout out. Lee was Tim's closest friend, guitarist, and biographer
Then he disappeared, broke and a little burnt out, and came back and did three albums of funk rock mixed with some Al Green style slightly white soul. those albums were more commercial and had some very good material and some not so good material. But since the lyrics included so many sexually explicit images and drug references, being somewhat creative but also a little hard to relate to, he never really did get much commercial success. but like many people, he's gotten a lot more attention in death, with plenty of concert recordings and compilations over the last 20 years or so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
He had made nine albums before age 28, had gotten in good physical and mental shape in 1975, with plans to do a movie and a screenplay (he was in a couple of experimental films including an improvisational encounter group film costarring O.J. Simpson and directed by Hal Ashby). After a gig, he took an invitation to go party at a friend's house. he reportedly overdosed on morphine and alcohol, his last words being "bye-bye baby", and since he had been clean for a while, the amount he took was more than he could handle. His friend was convicted on a manslaughter charge for supplying and fixing him up with the drugs.
he did all that by age 28.
he had a musically meaningful range of just over four octaves. He cleanly and expressively hit notes Freddie Mercury couldn't come close to - he was a skinny little guy with a mop of curly hair, and he had one of the richest, widest, most muscular and tender voices you’ve ever heard. Some folks stuggle with his stuff, becuase the songs, in whtever style, are so uniquely his own, and because the voice so intense, so commanding. His singing was every bit as strong or stronger than Freddie’s, and had far better pitch and control. And Freddie Mercury was great. Tim could have been an incredible rock singer, in whatever style, but he kept morphing, one album to the next.
Again, if you have a singer in mind who you think can hit five or six octaves, go actually count the notes. Let me know if it's more than three octaves. Very few of you have ever heard any person sing more than a three octave span, and among classically trained singers, including opera singers, there are very few who had more than four octaves. And they are the singers who've been thoroughly trained to control every muscle involved in making sound. Besides, the number is silly to worry about. Its the music, the expression, the communication. You don't judge great novelists by how many words they can type in a minute
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