The Gregorio Project, Salve Regina and My True Vocal Tone (F#3, Gb3)

6:35 PM Eastern Friday. This link to The Gregorio Project is for future reference, if and when it is time for me to learn to compose and publish chant in Gregorian notation. In the meantime, I feel deeply blessed to open this session with the above video, SALVE REGINA (Solemn Tone) | Chants of Deliverance. It's a healing Christian musical response to my recent difficult encounter with Psalm 137:9. Now I will jump right in to warming up my voice and finding my natural vocal range.

8:10 PM. Well, that didn't go quite as planned. Here's what I did. I started by watching a YouTube short by Janelle Scott of TrueSong Voice Studio called "How to Find Your Real Singing Voice, or True Vocal Tone." 

Then I turned off my noisy air conditioner, fired up FL Studio 2025, loaded a new project, armed and tested my USB microphone, and recorded a short warm-up speech track. Next, I recorded a second track in which I spoke and chanted "hey" several times, reaching for a sustained tone that was natural, resonant, and comfortable for me to produce. After that very brief warm-up, I recorded a short and focused third track in which I chanted a single drawn out "hey" for ten seconds, more or less all in the same recitation tone. Let's call this phase 1 of tonight's session.

Moving into phase 2, I used Google Gemini AI to learn how to use Edison in FL Studio 2025 to detect the pitch of my audio sample. It returned a value of F#3, which I didn't quite understand at first. In order to get a better handle on this Edison value, I plugged in my keyboard controller, linked it up to FL Keys in the piano roll mode, and confirmed that my audio sample matches the pitch of F#4 in the FL Studio 2025 piano roll. Which is it, F#3 or F#4? Eventually I learned that my true vocal tone in this audio sample is at F#3, or Gb3, in Standard Pitch Notation (SPN), because FL Studio 2025 is offset by an octave. What FL Studio 2025 tells me is C5 is actually C4 in SPN, or middle C. The frequency of F#3/Gb3 is 185 Hz. This is an amazing coincidence because I currently live at house number 185 in my analog life. It's been my mom's house for 35 years. What are the odds? What might God be trying to tell me with this coincidence?  

10:13 PM. Continuing into phase 3, I confirmed that I can fairly comfortably match the pitch of both a "da" and an internal hum to all seven notes of the C major scale from C3 to C4 in SPN. Experimenting a bit further, continuing to use the keyboard controller and my voice, I discovered that I can "da" and hum reasonably well from C2 to C5, which neatly fits the range of my 37-key controller when it is set to Octave -1. But this doesn't yet tell me whether I am a bass, baritone, tenor, or countertenor:

I am guessing that I am a baritone. Perhaps in my next Christian musical formation session I will try to nail this down. But I think my first step, when I return to this thread on Sunday night, God willing, is to revisit Paul Rose on the "Our Father" in this video and in this video.

Here is another stunning version of Salve Regina to close out tonight's session (Salve Regina (simple tone) | 450 Voices – Virtual Choir | Catholic Music):

Amen and God bless!