I was reminded today of an experience I had while my band recorded our CD. The engineer is a friend of mine and when we were meeting with him about what we wanted to do, we somehow got on the topic of a band that he recorded once. It was a young metal band where the singer prided himself on singing and not just doing the stereotypical cookie monster growling.
They're at the point where they are tracking vocals. My friend John recalls how as soon as the singer opened his mouth, the look on his bandmate's faces were the look of someone seeing an alligator walking on its hind legs. Turns out for whatever reason, but they had NO idea what he sounded like..probably one of those bands who play so loud they can't hear each other. Well John says that when the singer wasn't in the room, the rest of the band discussed the vocals being fixed. So John agreed and he said that he more or less had to fix every note and even then, it was still pretty terrible.
The kicker is, when the singer heard what they did he remarked "You killed my style! I don't sing that way".
But the funniest part of the story was when John played some of the band for us (they broke up in the studio while they were trying to finish the CD). The first words I heard out of the singer's mouth were "I hate my life, everything sucks".
