I can’t sing worth beans, and what’s worse, I don’t get that I can’t sing, 'cause it sounds great to me. I just don’t understand music, even though I love the hell out of it and really admire the people who are good at it.
Here’s my question for people who are really good at singing: Can you sing badly on purpose? Is it difficult for you? Do you find that your voice wants to start singing right or well?
I don’t know if I’d say “every” good singer can sing bad intentionally, but I would say in general, yes. Plus, it’s fun.
If you mean dodgy vocal technique, then yes, easy as falling off a log. Karaoke nights can be fun. 
But deliberately singing out of tune or time, that would be hard…
Yeah, when you say you can’t sing do you mean:
[ul]
[li]Your tonal quality/technique is poor.[/li]
[li]Your pitch is imprecise, but still relatively on.[/li]
[li]Your pitch bears no resemblance to the actual pitches of the song.[/li][/ul]
I can sing badly, but it probably sounds like someone who can sing well who’s singing badly on purpose for comic effect. As to whether I can sing badly and sound like someone who can’t sing at all, I dunno. I haven’t tried lately.
Not necessarily .
There’s one song, an oldie, that I absolutely drive my husband NUTS with because I sing it exactly a half-step flat. On purpose.
It’s gotten to the point where he wants to change the station every time he hears it because I hurt his ears. 
Don’t know. Thanks for asking.
Seriously, I don’t understand music well enough to understand exactly what I’m doing wrong. Strangely, I can tell when other people are singing badly, although I can’t put my finger on what they’re doing wrong either.
IMHO, YMMV: If it sounds off without you being able to put your finger on it (they’re not mangling the words, singing a completely different tune, completely out of rhythm), their pitches are probably slightly off.
The best way I can explain what I mean: take any recording of a familiar song to you and turn the speed up, just a bit. Then slow it down, just a bit. The song sounds wonky, because the pitches are flatter or sharper than what you’ve been used to hearing.
It’s hard for me to go off-pitch (I have perfect pitch and I’ll usually end up self-correcting), but I can sing pretty badly, if I need to. 
That’s exactly the distinction I was going to make: singing badly on purpose is easy, but sounding like someone who can’t sing is hard.
I agree completely. 99% of good singers trying this will just ape bad singing that they’ve heard, and even then not very well. For one thing, actual bad singing is far more subtle than you think - the little inaccuracies of pitch and rhythm, and unintential modulations of tone color - and imitations tend to be much broader parodies. Plus, no matter how badly a good singer tries to sing, you can usually still hear the core of a decently functioning voice in it, and so there is something unauthentic about it. The best analogy is that of a coordinated person trying to imitate someone who is uncoordinated - you can “mock” the behavior, but it’s hard to make it look genuine.
I remember seeing the NY City Ballet once where a dancer had to dance around like a clod-hopping goof, and I wondered how hard he had to fight against years of training to do it.
My question for really good singers is, how good can someone get who has no natural ability? I understand the difference between being able to technically hit the notes, and having an interesting or pleasing tone/quality to your voice (I think). How hard is each step, first learning the notes and then learning to sound nice?
And feel free to tell me that it’s impossible in some/many cases. I don’t mean to sound like with enough practice anyone could be a good singer, because I know a lot of it is natural talent. I just know that I did become somewhat better after joining a choir, and when my friend tells me she is terrible (“tone-deaf”, and I’m not sure what that means) I say that there is some room for improvement.
In voice training, you’re taught to do exactly what you want to do with your voice. Yeah, I can sing poorly on purpose - but I leave it to my husband, who’s a natural.
I can sing badly if I want to but I find that it takes quite a lot more concentration and effort to maintain than the “correct” technique. An anecdote: about 6 weeks ago our choir laid down the soundtrack for the TV advertisements for this winter’s football season. We’re all trained singers. The client wanted a “football crowd” sound e.g. fairly raucous and not quite in tune. It took the choir a good hour to “unlearn” all of our vocal techniques sufficiently to produce the “natural crowd” sound that the client wanted. Once we had it, it then took only another 15 minutes to lay down the sound track.
I’ve taught voice for 10 years now, and I’m prepared to say that there are some people in the world who will never be able to carry a tune, no matter how hard they work at it. But those folks are rare. I’ve only had one student that I truly think was hopeless. After a full year of lessons, he still couldn’t reproduce a single pitch accurately, either from the piano or from my example.
(by the way, actual cases of “tone deafness” are exceedingly rare. Usually, it’s not a matter of hearing things correctly - but instead the ability to reproduce those things accurately with the voice. If your friend can tell the difference between two notes, or recognize a tune, she’s not tone deaf…)
In my experience, 99% of people with interest (and having interest is key, since nobody gets better by not trying and not caring…) can improve to a point of being competent at singing. By competent, I mean singing correct pitches at the correct time in a reasonably healthy way. That’s not to say it will be especially attractive, or loud, or musically expressive - or easy to learn. For some people the work involved to just reach that point is prohibitive.
What you said to your friend is usually true - that if they get involved with a regular singing activity, like a choir, and stick with it, they will usually become more skillful and capable. Lessons and dedicated practice allow for significantly bigger improvement, but often just as slow.
My 2 cents from experience.
I’m so glad that Figaro is in this thread, because I was going to say that your question is probably better suited to someone who teaches voice.
I’m a 34-year-old soprano. I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember, and I took voice lessons in high school (and some summers during college). However, I cannot tell you how hard it is to, say, learn to sing on-key, because I did not ever have to learn that myself. I learned things like how to breathe (biggie), where to put my tongue while singing the “ee” sound, how to transition between my chest voice and head voice, etc. I already knew how to sing on-key and how to “sound nice” – I even already knew music theory and how to sight-read, because by the time I took my first voice lesson I’d been playing the piano for 8 years. So, I can’t talk about learning stuff that I didn’t have to learn (or don’t remember learning) myself, and I think that many “really good” singers will have a similar handicap.
That’s okay. Singers are rarely paid in beans. Free beer, sometimes, but not beans.
How would a person know if they sing wrongly or not?
I ask because I used to think i was ok-ish at singing. Not great but not totally horrible. Then a friend who is very musical said once that i was singing wrong (we were singing in a group). I can’t remember what exactly she said but it was something about changing key or pitch. I’ve not had any musical training and she has had loads so obviously she can identify this stuff more. But is there some way a person can tell if they themself are singing wrong?
Someday there will be a selective genetic option (…an SGO) for exceptional voice characteristics. There will be prefab warblers bred for their instruments. A//orld of Kelly Clarksons and Pavarottis.
All of us, damned to eternity within a world of sweet voiced seraphim.
The quality well but the talent low.
This is slightly ot, but I figure with all the singers in the thread someone may be able to help me. I’ve played violin and bassoon for 10+ years, so my pitch is fine, but my voice still sounds raw and untrained and not something that other people would willingly listen to.
How do I find a voice teacher? The yellow pages got nothin’, and I don’t necessarily want to sing opera style so that means the college is out, too.