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BigGuy wrote:One of the things I quickly noticed in my short stent as choir director at church was that so very often the folks with the least musical ability had the loudest voices. I came to realize that these folks were truly unaware that they were off key. They were absolutely unable to hear (keys?/tones?/melodies?) and therefore didn't understand they weren't hitting them.

Yes! This!

I remember an article (or perhaps an interview) some time back with a well-known vocal coach. He was asked how he determines if a student is "gifted."

He said that it wasn't what we might expect. It wasn't the vocal chords. While the anatomy of the vocal chords and mouth play a part, there isn't a significant amount of variance from one person to the next.

He said what differs is the neural connection between the ear, the brain, and the vocal chords. If that neural connection is exceptional, the singer has perfect pitch and the voice does what the ear tells it to do.

I don't typically watch singing reality shows. But a friend pointed me to this season's X Factor because of a little 13-year-old girl, Carly Rose Sonnenclar. She's an example of exceptional neural connections.

I'm a natural baritone. Decent tone quality...if I could ever actually hit a note. Think of Randy Jackson saying, "Yo, Dog; that was just really, really pitchy."

A few years ago I went on a Caribbean cruise with a large party of friends, most of a similar age. On a karaoke night, I was pressured to give it a try. After careful consideration, I told them the only song I felt I could attempt was Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald.

There was silence at the table while they considered the gentle motion of the ship and the fact that we were in the Atlantic somewhere between Nassau and the Turks. They wisely decided they didn't want me to attempt a bad version of a song about a famously disastrous shipwreck. Haven't been asked to karaoke since...