This is bad advice. Pitch does seem to be something you have or not (research suggests most kids are pitch perfect and lose it to various extents) but the other parts of singing well are highly technical skills and a teacher will help significantly. Larynx placement, anchoring, muscle relaxation, breath control... etc are all difficult skills to master.

There's a reason that so many pop/rock singers ruin their voices, it's because they don't get training.

This is a little misleading, to the point of being wrong with respect to the 'health warning'.

First - unambiguously, the vast majority of people who sing learned to do so reasonably well before any hint of real coaching, other than possibly little bits that a student/church choir teacher may be able to help with.

It's misrepresentative to hint that an amateur singer, singing occasionally for fun, will somehow how run into trouble, physically, without this. In fact, the majority of people who 'sing a lot' will never have such problems. I sang in a 16 part Jazz choir in my youth, and have always been involved in music, and I don't even recall anyone in my circle losing their voice or having voice trouble (I don't doubt that it's possible), and I don't recall anyone getting specific voice lessons either, that said being part of a choir helps, but we weren't hugely focused on technique in that kind of specificity. Most non-famous pop act singers have not had any real formal training - it's simply unnecessary.

Singing is a little bit like running, you just need a pair of shoes, if you do it a lot and enjoy it, you will get better and it will mostly come naturally. If you are part of any kind of singing group, like a choir, you'll pick up some really simple things that will take you a really long way. If you want to get even better, you can get some coaching, but you don't need it.

The other thing I will add is that a 'singing coach' might move you into a more formal way of singing that might clash with your own creative sensibilities. Many old-school rock stars sing 'terribly' from a technical perspective, but they didn't know better, it's just 'how they do it' and it enabled them to have their own unique flavour. A singing coach early on who moved them into a more 'choral' way of singing ... might have taken that uniqueness away.

In every children's choir, there are a handful of great singers who haven't taken highly specific instruction with respect to technique, singing is natural. Probably a 10 minute, basic youtube instruction would go quite far in terms of basic things just as it might be for amateur running tips.

Big caveat: in my own personal experience, everyone grew up with music i.e. choir, instruments, etc. which will lead to different outcomes and perspectives than someone who has absolutely no exposure to music.

I feel this is very very wrong and damaging, I'd like to make sure anyone reading this comment has a balancing comment to read against it, mainly about the pitch thing. The kind of thing I wish I'd been able to read 10 years ago.

First, you're probably not tone deaf. If you can differentiate between one note and a note a semitone away, you've got enough pitch to sing. If you can watch two youtube videos, think one sounds good and one sounds bad, you've got enough pitch to sing.

I spent a long time worrying about this because I struggled with pitch a lot, and then even though I could eventually (with a lot of adjustment) get my voice to make a sound at the same pitch as a piano key, it didn't sound "right" or "good". Even though the tuner told me i was right on it. Also the pitch always seemed different inside my head to listening back to it.

In the end it turns out it's all about frequencies. Your voice is making a whole bunch of them when you vocalise, it's not just a simple sine wave, and these resonate at different places, and sound different inside your head (to you) and outside (to everyone else). When I had the pitch issues, I actually mainly had placement issues. Good placement feels like cutting off the lower half of my voice, but is pretty much just you making the right frequencies and more importantly avoiding making the wrong ones. To a natural singer this probably sounds like crazy talk, but to someone who always sounded bad, this is life-changing.

So yeah, ignore the parent comment, find a good teacher who started from nothing and can teach you placement (I still recommend https://bohemianvocalstudio.com/), and practise like crazy. You'll never look back.