Voice type
Famous bass-baritones
7 cited ranges on one keyboard — a bass's bottom with a baritone's working middle, common in storytelling styles.
Singers here
7
Median span
2.2 oct
Conventional band
F#2–F#4
Share of library
2%
of 357 voices
What a bass-baritone is
Bass-baritone describes a voice that reaches genuine bass depth but spends most of its time in baritone territory, which is why the label shows up so often around country and folk. The bottom notes are real but used as colour, not as the home key.
The category blurs at both edges, so the same singer is often filed as bass on one source and baritone on another.
What the 7 bass-baritones here show
- Widest cited span: Fred Hammond at E2–A#4 (2.5 octaves); narrowest is Waylon Jennings at E2–D4.
- The group bottoms out at D2 (Leonard Cohen) and tops out at A#4 (Fred Hammond) — 32 semitones from the floor of the category to its ceiling.
- Prominence spans 1955 to 1993, and the median cited span is 26 semitones against F#2–F#4 for the conventional bass-baritone 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.
All 7 on one axis