Famous basss
3 cited ranges on one keyboard — the lowest male category, built on weight and depth rather than reach.
What a bass is
A bass carries more vocal-fold mass than any other category, which is what gives the bottom of the range its size — notes that another singer can technically hit but not fill. The trade is at the top: where a baritone still has room, a bass is already working hard, so the repertoire tends to sit low and move slowly.
Basses are the rarest category in recorded popular music, and the figures collected here reflect that — a handful of voices against a hundred-plus tenors.
What the 3 basss here show
- Widest cited span: Ivan Rebroff at F1–F5 (4.0 octaves); narrowest is Barry White at D2–E4.
- The group bottoms out at D#1 (Avi Kaplan) and tops out at F5 (Ivan Rebroff) — 50 semitones from the floor of the category to its ceiling.
- Prominence spans 1966 to 2011, and the median cited span is 46 semitones against E2–E4 for the conventional bass band.
Voice categories are guides borrowed from choral and operatic practice, not boxes. Plenty of these singers are filed differently by different sources, and a category says more about where a voice is comfortable than about the notes it can reach.