How To Change A Song’s Pitch In Audacity (To Better Suit Your Voice)

Singing your favourite songs is fun, until you come across one that’s outside of your vocal range. With a little know-how, you can change a song’s pitch with the free, cross-platform audio editor Audacity.

We’ve shown you how to find your vocal range before, but if you have favourite songs that aren’t in your range, this trick fixes that. You can easily grab the instrumental or karaoke version of the song and use Audacity to change the pitch. Here’s how:

1. If you haven’t already, download and install Audacity, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
2. Head to File > Import > Audio.
3. Navigate to the audio file you want to adjust, select it, and click “OK”.
4. Shrink the song down to see the clip using the magnifying glass icon on the top right of the screen.
5. Move your cursor to the end of the clip, then hold Shift and click to select the entire clip.
6. Navigate to Effect > Change Pitch.
7. The Change Pitch menu will pop up. Select the current key of the song (most karaoke versions of songs include this information, but you can always use resources like Song Key Finder and Google too).
8. In the “Semitones (half-step)” field, input how many steps you would like to move the pitch. If you want to go down two steps in pitch, you would input “-2.00”, and if you want to go up two steps, input “2.00”.

You can change the pitch for songs with vocals, but be prepared to deal with a chipmunk or baritone effect if you transpose too far. In addition to practising vocals, this is also a great way to rehearse your favourite songs on an instrument in different keys, which many instrumentalists have to do to for cover performances.

6: Change Pitch with Audacity [Jon Harnum (YouTube)]