the star spangled banner song for kids karaoke

That’s because it has a huge range you have to sing high, low and everything in between.

No matter the key, like “Happy Birthday,” the national anthem is just plain difficult. At last year’s Super Bowl, Gladys Knight sang it beautifully and much lower, in a range that seemed to fit her voice perfectly. You may have seen singer Demi Lovato perform it earlier this month at the Super Bowl, singing it well in the common key of A-flat. Douglas McCall and Bryan Nichols/Penn State UniversityĪnother notoriously tough song to sing is the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Most Americans have heard it and likely even sung it. The arrow points to the highest note of ‘Happy Birthday,’ which is the hardest note for many people to hit. Teaching those students and others later eventually led me to wonder, why is it that some of the songs we know the best are the hardest ones to sing? The Happy Birthday ClubĪs a professor, choir director and researcher at Penn State University, I’m trying to answer this question with my colleagues, in what we affectionately named the “ Happy Birthday Club,” by investigating the conditions that elicit the best singing from individuals. Without a doubt, some of the students, no matter their singing ability, had a tough time hitting some of the notes in these two familiar songs.

We often sang spontaneously, too, belting out “Happy Birthday” if someone was celebrating theirs on a rehearsal day. Like all of us, my students had their own preferences in terms of the styles and genres they liked to sing, but of course there were the mainstays that we all had to learn – for example, the national anthem, which we practiced as soloists and as a multi-part choir. It brought me back to my time as a music teacher in the late 2000s in my home state of Kentucky. We sang a popular duet, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s “Shallow,” to the room’s applause, and I remembered how good it felt to sing into a microphone. You can likely picture the scene: a restaurant adjacent to a bowling alley with a cheerful crowd and enthusiastic DJ aiming lights at a small stage. Some friends and I recently went to karaoke.

The star spangled banner song for kids karaoke