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.
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.