Sometimes you listen to a record and can’t help thinking - didn’t they notice that guitar’s not in tune? I don’t mean stuff that’s deliberate, like Santana’s presumably for effect rather sharp playing at the start of his version of Black Magic Woman - but stuff that just an error due to tired ears in the control room.
A couple of examples: Jack Bruce’s bass near the start of Cream’s Badge is suddenly a quarter tone flat. Springsteen’s Glory Days features a guitar that sounds miles out of tune.
Any other examples? Let’s stay away from vocalists lest the thread take a turn which gets one of the Café Society’s mods’ dander up.
On all of those great Stax/Volt songs featuring the Memphis Horns, Wayne Jackson’s trumpet has always sounded just a bit flat to me, but I love their sound. Especially in “When a Man Loves a Woman” at the very end. It may be flat, but it’s perfect!
Neil Young’s song “Out of My Mind” by the Buffalo Springfield has some seriously out-of-tune guitar work (forget his voice - it’s never really in tune). And the harmonies in the Grateful Dead’s classic “Uncle John’s Band” are shot to hell.
I guess it’s a case of the medium being the message. They were stoned. Why weren’t you?
In just about every song Offspring does, the lead vocalist is sharp. I hate listening to them because I have perfect pitch. Yes, I know they’re a punk group. As long as punk vocalists scream, I can handle it. But they can’t sing in tune.
Many ABBA songs re-dub the vocals up by a quarter (or eighth, I forget) tone, which gave the vocals their distinctive quality. (Heard this in an ABBA documentary.)
The guitar in Nirvana’s ‘Polly’ was flat. In an interview I heard somewhere Cobain said that he got the guitar used on that song for something like $10 at a pawn shop and it would not stay in tune, but he liked it’s sound.
“Wild Honey Pie” by the Beatles. That song sounds like it was played on a bent saw blade, so how could it ever be in tune?
Speaking of the Beatles, “Do You Want to Know a Secret” was recorded before George Harrison learned to sing. It could have been a really nice song, but his badly out-of-tune singing ruined it.
This may be slightly off topic in that this response deals with drums/timing, but it still seems like it would fit.
I don’t really have any problems with Chicago’s drummer Danny Seraphine, I think he did a bang up job(no pun intended) on “Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is”, but on “Colour My World”, the drum track drives me batty, somewhat ruining an otherwise beautiful song. The tempo in the intro speeds up and slows down, and Mr. Seraphine, assuming that was him, even misses a rimclick on the backbeat, while not sounding very accurate throughout the song. Something of a contrast to the rest of their music.