Famous basses
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 basses here show
- Widest cited span: Ivan Rebroff at F1–F5 (4.0 octaves); narrowest is Samuel Ramey at D#2–F4.
- The group bottoms out at B0 (Tim Storms) and tops out at F5 (Ivan Rebroff) — 54 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.
Every bass on one axis
Singers Avi Kaplan through Tim Storms
How high — and how low — basses sing
How high can a bass sing?
The conventional bass band tops out around E4, but recorded basses are cited well past it: the highest note among the 5 basses indexed here is F5, cited for Ivan Rebroff.
How low can a bass sing?
Conventionally the bass band bottoms out around E2. The lowest cited note among the basses here is B0, cited for Tim Storms.