Songs for a bass voice
22 songs whose melody stays inside E2 to E4 from start to finish, out of 324 measured. Allow three semitones of transposition either way and it becomes 75.
That is a small number, and it is the honest answer to why basses run out of things to sing. Popular music is written around the middle of a tenor, so a melody that stays inside E2 to E4 from beginning to end is genuinely rare. Allowing three semitones of transposition roughly triples the list, which is what most basses end up doing anyway.
The list
Sorted by artist, showing 22 of 22. The two notes are where the melody spends its time, not the single highest and lowest note it touches.
| Song | Artist | Sits between |
|---|---|---|
| Summertime Blues | Alan Jackson | E2 to D4 |
| Takin Care of Business | Bachman-Turner Overdrive | C4 to E4 |
| Big Shot | Billy Joel | G3 to D4 |
| The Thunder Rolls | Brooks Garth | C3 to D4 |
| Higher | Creed | F#3 to E4 |
| Calling Elvis | Dire Straits | A3 to E4 |
| Tequila Sunrise | Eagles | F#3 to C#4 |
| What Is This Thing Called Love | Frank Sinatra | A2 to C4 |
| A Trick of the Tail | Genesis | E3 to D#4 |
| Let Her Cry | Hootie & the Blowfish | G3 to B3 |
| Believe | John Elton | G3 to D#4 |
| Fever | Madonna | A3 to E4 |
| Stand by Me | Oasis | G3 to D#4 |
| I Dig Rock 'n' Roll Music | Peter, Paul & Mary | F#3 to E4 |
| The Miracle | Queen | G#2 to F#3 |
| Countdown | Rush | E2 to E4 |
| Smooth | Santana | D3 to E4 |
| Come and Get It | The Beatles | C3 to C4 |
| Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby | The Beatles | F3 to C4 |
| Matchbox | The Beatles | A3 to E4 |
| Mean Mr. Mustard | The Beatles | F3 to D#4 |
| Leave Me Alone | The Corrs | G3 to E4 |
See all 22, and set your own two notes
Check your low note before you trust this page
If you measured your bottom note on a laptop, it is probably wrong. A reader tested his own microphone in Audacity on 5 September 2026 and the waveform disappears entirely below C2. Most laptop and headset mics are voiced for speech, which sits above roughly 150Hz, and they roll off hard below it. That matters more on this page than anywhere else on the site, because everything here turns on where your low note actually is. A phone usually reaches lower than a laptop.
Why a voice type is a bad way to pick songs
A voice type is not a range. It is where your voice sits happily and where it changes gear, and two people called bass can have their break in different places. A choir director put it to me more bluntly than that, and he was right. Using E2 to E4 as a filter is a starting point, not a verdict.
If you would rather work from your own two notes, the range test measures them in about a minute in the browser, then hands them straight to the full song list.
Where these numbers come from
They are read out of MIDI transcriptions from the Lakh MIDI Dataset, CC BY 4.0, by Colin Raffel. Human beings typed those melodies in by ear and about a fifth of the songs transcribed twice have versions that disagree by a whole octave. Only songs with two agreeing transcriptions and a range a voice can produce made it here. I also labelled all 214 acts by whether the lead singer is a man or a woman, and removed the 108 male-led songs sitting above B4, where no male pop singer spends a song. What is left still runs high on average for male voices, so a title here is a shortlist entry rather than a fact. The main page sets out the whole method.
Other voice types, baritone, tenor, alto, mezzo-soprano, soprano.