I am struck dumb by my own suck.

[JetWolf]

I grew up on classic rock. (Well, wasn't classic to my mum, but you know.) I've always typically been more into music from the '60s and '70s more than whatever decade I happen to actually be sitting in at the time. So obviously this week's pack was a delight for me.

Guitar, bass and drum all played on them, I settle down to give the vocals a whirl. I go to "Simple Man" and chuckle to myself with that sort of self-satisfaction you get when you know, you just know, you're going to do something so fantastically well that people will still be talking about how awesome you are this time next year. Even the ones who aren't actually there to watch you do it. Which would be everybody.

Then I sang it.

Holy crap. I am full of wrong.

I still can't entirely figure out what I did. But I managed to do it again the next time I tried it too.

I've been singing this song for longer than some members of this forum have been alive. Just turns out that I've been TOTALLY SUCKING AT IT this entire time.

Anybody else had a similar rude awakening courtesy of Rock Band?

[lawrence1103]

Yeah that happened to me with In Bloom, Enter Sandman, Paranoid and Don't Fear The Reaper. I know these songs by heart and when i started singing them i completely got booed off stage and failed the song (even on easy) so i gave up vocals and started playing the drums and haven't looked back since. I suck at singing and I will not ever go near that mic again. My friends and girlfriend are the ones who sing.

[BlueFantasy]

Sure! I learned that my casual singing is not accurate enough for the game (ok I actually learned that in Karaoke Revolution). I also learned that no matter how good my husband says I sing "Maps" and "I Think I'm Paranoid" I still can't seem to get 100% on Expert. :)

[Deftallica]

I got a pretty rude awakening when I tried to sing the Metallica pack songs. Don't get me wrong, I passed, but I was thinking to myself before I started, "man there's no way I'll fail these, I know them by heart" and I couldn't 100% a single one of them.

I also thought, being a big fan of Portal and "Still Alive" that I would do fantastically well at that too but didn't 100% that either.

[DarkEternal37]

The game is just crazy that way. My girlfriend is a Jazz vocalist and has been singing in organized groups for almost a decade. She's got a great voice no doubt. The game just seems to prefer my "killing a cat/strangling a goat" method for some reason.

[botnic]

Expert singer in rockband = me running to grab a butter knife to puncture my eardrums. Take <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsG-0IZE4Xs">this</a> for example. Expert, five stars, and somewhat painful to listen too. I tell people all the time to just sing on easy and sing the song like normal. It's not fun to sing when you are going for points and sing in the annoying flat sounding voice.

[Rorschach1976]

Kind of off topic, but on a similar note....
I'm constantly amazed at how ignorant I've been of the lyrics of lots of these songs for years. For example, I've been familiar with My Iron Lung by Radiohead pretty much since the Bends came out and I thought I knew it inside out. but then I learn that he's saying "My uncle Bill My Belisha beacon" in the chorus.
What the hell? How did I miss that?

EDIT: Also Coheed and Cambria... I love C&C but had no idea what they were singing about until I got Rock Band :D

[BlueFantasy]

LMAO @ video. I aggrivate myself trying to get that achivement for 100&#37; on Expert vocals. Still haven't finished, since I get mad and restart every time something besides "awesome" comes up.

Adding: Yes, but I swear that Nirvana says "don't know what it means" instead of "knows not what it means" but whatever...

[JetWolf]

EDIT: Also Coheed and Cambria... I love C&C but had no idea what they were singing about until I got Rock Band :D

Ha, I STILL don't know what they're singing about. ;)

I get that a lot too though. "Call Me" just yesterday was a good example. "Oh, she's singing French there? I always wondered."

A friend of mine was so excited when she was doing vocals on "Roam". She had no idea that the "I hear a wind, whistling air" bit was actually words.

Fun stuff, fun stuff.

[Greg_R]

The game is just crazy that way. My girlfriend is a Jazz vocalist and has been singing in organized groups for almost a decade. She's got a great voice no doubt. The game just seems to prefer my "killing a cat/strangling a goat" method for some reason.That's probably because she is singing what she heard in the original song or is adding her own musicality to it (vs what is on the chart). My wife is the same way... she is a much better singer but I stick rigidly to what I see on the screen and tend to get slightly higher scores (she hits the pitch perfectly right off the bat while I tend to search for a bit :) ).

[bisq]

I was schooled by Mississippi Queen the first time I sang it on expert...and I know that song cold...at least I thought i did :o

[DarkEternal37]

No it's because her voice has vibrato and the game doesn't like vibrato.

[Groghunter]

Adding: Yes, but I swear that Nirvana says "don't know what it means" instead of "knows not what it means" but whatever...

I can't be bothered to check, but doesn't it alternate after at some point between the two?

[LinkStrifeLeonhart]

If anything, Rock Band has taught me the opposite lesson. My casual sing-a-long is pretty close to what it is in the game. I was very surprised at this. Needless to say I nailed Simple Man (save the one talky part). Sure, I'm not super-duper 100% on Expert, but I do get 4+ stars on the songs that I know and love.

[xxpigxx]

LMAO @ video. I aggrivate myself trying to get that achivement for 100% on Expert vocals. Still haven't finished, since I get mad and restart every time something besides "awesome" comes up.


Sing Move Along. I got 100% the first time. Very easy.

[Daytman]

Ten Speed hurt me. I love Coheed, and I can do expert vocals on Welcome Home. Ten Speed is one of my favorite songs by them, but I can barely sing it on medium :/

[xxpigxx]

Welcome Home makes me dizzy . . . literally. I can't sing in octaves. I have to imitate the singer. Claudio is so friggin up there, I run out of air.

It happens to me on The Kill as well.

I still 5 star them . . . but I have to take a break after words.

[Yngvild_Axen]

I suppose that the primary flaw in Rockband is most exposed by the vocals part: You can't add your own stylings to the music, and score well. It's a bit artificial for a performer to have to mimic another performance perfectly, IMO. It's still a fantastically fun game, despite that though.

You don't suck, JetWolf, you just have your own style! :D

[CM_Drunk]

I dont sing...but my gf gets booed off stage when she sings Ramones songs, and shes the biggest Ramones fan I know

[jamminjon82]

I suck at singing, even on easy.

[McClane713]

Haha. Read this and had to comment. I used to do Karaoke all the time, and sang half the songs in the game. Everyone at my Rockband party begged me to do "Enter Sandman" because they heard me do it before. Yeah, definately failed out and booed off stage in like a minute.
And i had it on Medium too.:mad:
But somehow my friend, who's singing voice somewhat resembles a cat drowning in lit gasoline can get a 100% on every song. He's the all time singer for our band now. I'll stick with drums.

[dirty_bird32]

I can sing and sound alright if I'm just singing, but in the game I have to hit the right pitch and everythign sounds flat and un-dynamic...it's the thing that bothers me most in the game

[JimmyRyan]

Singing is the only instrument I can play well in Rock Band. I knew that going in. Always been a singer, always sucked at non-vocal instruments. I've worked my way up to Hard on bass, guitar, and drums, but it will take me a long time (years, perhaps) to play on Expert.

That's why singing is so much different than the other three instruments. It relies more on natural abilities moreso than the others (of course not to say that the others don't AT ALL, some people jump right into Expert drums while others take months to get there). What I mean is, if you are born with tone deafness, you will probably never be able to sing in this game. I have a tone deaf friend who tried to sing Blitzkrieg Bop...failed out 1/4 of the way in on Easy. He just can't pick up the pitch. Unlike tone deaf people, you wouldn't have an easy time finding a person who cannot handle Easy guitar, etc after some training.

Anyways, to address the topic, there are some songs I was familiar with coming in that rocked my world for a while. Enter Sandman and In Bloom come to mind immediately. I even failed out at the end of Foreplay Longtime despite singing it non-stop for the month or two before the game was released. I was initially resistant to humming instead of singing, but have to admit that when I started humming to get high scores, the hard parts became much easier to complete. When I sing for fun, with a group of people, I usually don't go any higher than Hard. You get too robotic sounding above that.

[Runa216]

Well, I'm the opposite of most of you, the songs I know and love I can get 5 stars on expert no problem (like Enter Sandman) but I have a horrible singing voice. I can pass any song, but passing and sounding good is a foreign idea to me.

simply put, I sound horrible, but I can get the proper pitch, as long as I'm changing octaves all the time (can't hit really high or low notes....gotta love abusing the system!)

That being said, I'm not claiming to be much of a singer, but I love to sing, and it's a lot of fun, unless you're playing with someone who decides to remind you every song that you sound bad (which is a blood given when you've never heard the song before and it's Serj Tankian....)

wanted to punch her in the babymaker.

[Xerosnake90]

I didn't know any of the songs when I started the game, but one song I can't figure out why it's so hard is Number of the Beast. I swear that, and Action have the worst and most incorrect pitch lines from any songs I have sung.

[xxpigxx]

Simple Man is pretty screwy too.

Reptilia . . . Arghhh. I hate singing that song.

[JetWolf]

You don't suck, JetWolf, you just have your own style! :D

Ha, that's it exactly. That's going to be my new excuse for everything.

"This meal doesn't suck, I just have my own style!"
"My grade on that test didn't suck, I just have my own style!"

Oh yeah, life's about to get sweet. ;)

[metAlApollo]

Due to this game i thought i could sing to all the metallica songs and i would sing them and it gave me false hope cause i suck at singing so i stick to drums and guitar.and my friend who is a okay singer who we call "creed" cause he sounds like the lead singer but he can only sing some of the songs cause he knows them.

[Arramis]

Well Jetwolf, I guess I'm in your club..the songs I love the most..not real good at singing them in this game. Oh, I can get 3 or 4 stars on EASY..but fail miserably on hard. With 1 and ONLY 1 exception..Don't Fear The Reaper. 5 stars on expert everytime. I just wish there were more BOC songs.:D

[The real Anteraan]

I can sing and sound alright if I'm just singing, but in the game I have to hit the right pitch and everythign sounds flat and un-dynamic...it's the thing that bothers me most in the game

Amen! The pitch lines don't even get the original singer's inflections close to right. In many cases, the better you know the song, the worse you'll be at it for a while...until you get the robotic thing down. Expert is really like this. I have to warm up with a few dozen renditions of, "Danger Will Robinson" to make sure I don't fail out. :rolleyes:

[Lithium_666]

yea, ive sung in a couple of real bands and everyone tells me im great, even ppl i dont know, i hate the flat style vocals of this game, it makes it harder since i have to try n sing worse. Enter Sandman, whats with having to sing all pretty to do good, come on its METAL!!! James Hetfield sound nothing like the way the game makes u sing it, his voice is raspy and METAL!!!!!!! And "You can't kill the metal!" according to Tenacious D, if only Jack Black saw the vocals for this game, lol

[JorynnRace]

Did you see that G4 TV thing with Coheed and Cambria? Claudio Sanchez said that when he played expert vocals on Welcome Home, he only got 84%

ON HIS OWN SONG! He did say that he sings it differently, and knowing him, he was probably drunk at the time... but STILL.

[Lithium_666]

yeah, pretty much if u do good at expert vox u sound horrible an nothing like the song, i dont play above hard so i can at least sound good