[Monkey Face]

I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks!

I dunno. I never understood that only the choir sings in the Catholic church. I like to sing. My range is pretty limited, and high notes...well, if I sing them, I have to do so in falsetto, which I hate.

[AnAmericanMother]

Your 'falsetto' is actually just your head voice (I'm a natural tenor too, really a true contralto). If you 'open up' the inside of your head (lift your palate, raise your cheekbones, lower your jaw, relax the throat - think of inflating a balloon inside the back of your mouth) and DON'T lift or move your head while you sing scales or warmup exercises, you'll feel the tone open out and soften. Scrunching down the palate and tensing the throat while singing falsetto produces that piercing unpleasant tone that hurts to sing.

What feels like a shift into falsetto (and would be if we were guys) is actually your "break", where you shift from your chest voice into your head voice. Moving over the break is always difficult, but with regular practice you can keep the resonance of the chest voice as you move up into the head voice, and correspondingly keep the open head voice as you move down into the chest. That blurs the 'break' and makes it less audible (and more comfortable!)

It sounds like we have similar voices, and my break is right around F# or G in the treble staff. In English Renaissance music that was written for male altos, there's a lot of crawling around on either side of G, so I have really had to work on smoothing out my break.

With good coaching and regular practice, my break is smoother, my tone is better, and my range has increased into the bargain.

[AnAmericanMother]

No, the choir is not SUPPOSED to sing alone in the Catholic Church -- but in a lot of parishes the congregation seems to be afraid to sing.

Some parishes go so far as to seed the nave with ringers, to get the others to sing along.