Dreadful Musician

Not pictured: spontaneous rainstorm, fleeing animals and furious villagers.

Kotomi: My name is Ichinose Kotomi. A senior in Class A. My hobby is reading books.
Tomoya: And her weapon is the violin. It takes only 0.2 seconds before sound waves come out from the moment she takes position. The number of people she's felled is countless.
Kotomi: [after playing some more] I've never felled people with the violin.
Tomoya: Do you see us on the floor right now?!

— CLANNAD

What a Lethal Chef is to food, a Dreadful Musician is to music. This is a character who sings or plays music badly. Glass shatters, animals scatter, and women lament. Their pitch is faulty, their tone is unpleasant and harsh, and their onstage demeanor is off-putting. Even worse, they may not even realize how bad they are, while everyone around them scrambles to halt the performance.

More clever characters may use this entirely-unintended effect to their advantage. Taken to the extreme, where this effect is obtained through skill and used as a weapon, the character becomes a Musical Assassin. If the lethality is the product of the music itself instead of the musician's lack of talent, it's a Brown Note. If the sound is literally capable of physically breaking objects and inflicting damage, it's a Glass-Shattering Sound (if it's mostly confined to shattering brittle materials) or Make Some Noise (if it's an all-purpose sonic weapon).

Irony as She Is Cast often comes into play here; it's not unusual to find that the bad musician is being played by a good one in Real Life. In fact, sometimes it takes a talented musician to know how to play one who's truly awful.

May overlap with Loud of War and Lounge Lizard; also compare Suckiness Is Painful, Three Chords and the Truth (where musicians do actually know how to play their instruments, but without the complexity and pretentiousness) and Stylistic Suck (same). Related to Hollywood Tone-Deaf, in which bad music is played more realistically although still exaggerated for comic effect; Terrible Artist, for when characters are unskilled at non-musical forms of art; and Giftedly Bad, for when someone is very bad at anything in general, but thinks they are good. See also Piss-Take Rap.

When adding examples, keep in mind that this trope by definition exaggerates the possible to the impossible.

No Real Life example is allowed here, there's the Narm.Music and Horrible.Music pages for such examples that fall under YMMV.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Soaky bubble bath commercial that paired Alvin with Mighty Mouse starts off with Alvin taking a bubble bath with the product while singing its jingle. Mighty Mouse is nearby and hears it. He comments "Uh-oh... someone's in trouble!"

Anime & Manga

• Uto, one of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You, claims to be a Wandering Minstrel but that’s just part of her Chuunibyou act. She actually has no musical training and as a result, her attempt at the ocarina sounds cacophonous (and her original songwriting isn’t much better either.) Fortunately for her, the other characters are all True Companions who love her music anyway solely because she puts her heart and soul into it.
• Yomi from Azumanga Daioh is good at many things, but singing definitely isn't one of them. Contrast Sakaki, who doesn't say much, but sings beautifully. (Ironically, Yomi's Japanese voice actress is well-respected for her singing abilities.)
• Case Closed's Kudo Shinichi/Edogawa Conan is a horrendous singer who also can't play an instrument to save his life. Everybody jokes about his tone-deafness, but he actually has perfect pitch; he just has no interest in getting better beyond emulating Sherlock Holmes. Ironically, his voice actor is a famous Idol Singer.
• ChocoMimi: Choco is a very poor singer. A strip in Volume 4 has her friends discuss this.
  Bambi: Once I heard her reading out loud...but she was just trying to sing! Sad.
  Mikami: Once I heard a cell phone vibrate...but she was humming. When Choco hits high notes, bats appear.
  Bambi: She emits sonic waves!
  Ando: [Thinking] Cool! I wanna hear that!
• Digimon Adventure has four such atrociously bad singers: Tai, Joe, Gomamon, and Agumon. Their attempt to wake up a sleeping Digimon with their singing is an absolute and hilarious fail.
  • In the dub, they're awful in different ways: Tai's actually not bad, but his singing doesn't fit the type of song being played; Joe's singing is in a complete monotone and part of it almost sounds like he's Rattling Off Legal; and Agumon and Gomamon are the worst, singing in high-pitched screeches.
• Mana from Doki Doki! PreCure is good at a lot of things, but she absolutely cannot sing, as shown when she sings a lullaby horribly and hilariously. She tries it again in one of the Pretty Cure All Stars movies with similar results.
  Hibiki: This is music?!
• Doraemon:
  • Takeshi "Gian" Gouda exaggerates this trope: he fancies himself a singer, but his voice is so awful it can be weaponized, with one chapter compares his singing to nuclear weapons. Even in "A World Without Sound", just reading his lyrics alone induces nausea. In a memorable scene from Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure into the Underworld, the team is being drawn in by sirens song which has also attracted a sea beast. The praise of the music annoys Gian, making him sing. Cue fleeing mermaids and a knocked-out monster. What makes it even more dangerous is that he is such a Miles Gloriosus about his talents, and those who don't want to hear him sing are seen as insulting to him, even if they're being honest.
  • Gian's dreadful singing is rivaled only by Shizuka's violin. The girl excels in many things but playing a violin is not one of them. Sadly, it's one of her hobbies.
• Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods:
  • Piccolo tries his hand at karaoke at Bulma's birthday party. We don't hear him, since the scene in question is mostly a montage of still frames, but the surrounding characters' reactions◊ leave little doubt about his lack of musical gifts.
  • Later in the movie, Vegeta invokes this deliberately when he tries to create the biggest and most amusing distraction he could think of to stop Beerus the God of Destruction from destroying the world. He also couples it with equally dreadful dancing, and it works.
    Beerus: Simply astounding, Whis, Vegeta's singing is actually worse than yours!
• Gajeel from Fairy Tail believes himself to be a good guitar player and singer. He's not good at either, although other guild members like his lyrics. His Shoody Doo Bop became a Memetic Mutation.
• Once in Gosick, Victorique singing was mistaken for her moaning in pain.
• Mikuru Asahina from Haruhi Suzumiya absolutely cannot sing. While this seldom transcends mere lack of quality, at one point in the Drama CD she has to sing especially badly to weaken a sound-based monster, and does so handily.
• While Nishizawa from Hayate the Combat Butler is perfectly ordinary in almost every aspect, her singing abilities leave much to be desired. When she challenges Nagi to a karaoke duel in the manga, Nishizawa's score is so low compared to Nagi's that the machine itself makes fun of her. Nagi's had vocal training for years, incidentally, and gets basically a perfect score.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: Shirogane is aware he's bad at singing, but not of how terrible it is. He think he's only a little tone-deaf, but in actual his singing is enough to make Fujiwara scream for help. But as bad as his singing is, his rapping is even worse.
• Mizuki's attempts to play the flute in Kamisama Kiss leave something to be desired. But don't take our word for it, see for yourself.
• In Key the Metal Idol, Key goes to a concert and is instructed to show what she can do. She then proceeds to sing a very high note that shatters glass, causes the audience to reel in pain, and short-circuits the robot puppet.
• Tokino in the original Kujibiki♡Unbalance OVA. She "wins" a karaoke competition by breaking the karaoke meter, as plants wither, birds fall dead out of the sky, nearby aircraft crash in flames, and the other contestants unsuccessfully attempt to keep from vomiting. Her singing voice is not provided by her normal voice actress, but by a tone-deaf fifty-year old man.
• The main character Weed of The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor has several times shown that his singing will make enemies of all his listeners. When posting one of his battles on the internet while transformed into an orc, people think it is a parody of how the race has no in-game culture. He is completely unaware of how bad he is.
• The titular character from Little Pollon is terrible in both singing and playing musical instruments.
• Konata from Lucky Star is an especially noxious karaoke singer, as the ending credits from many of the anime's episodes reveal. Still, the sheer spunk of her performance almost makes up for the fact that she can't carry a tune to save her life. It is quite a feat of Aya Hirano, Konata's voice actress, who is a very proficient singer in reality.
• In Macross 7, Gamlin Kizaki tried to sing, despite Basara's protests, and this trope is the result. Then the Protodeviln eventually start attempting it. Sivil actually isn't too bad, but Gigil and Geppelnitch are absolutely horrendous. Still, they do manage to produce Spiritia through it. Like the previous example, Gamlin's voice actor Takehito Koyasu is actually quite a talented singer..
• Dorothy from MÄR keeps a living rag doll as one of her retinue of Guardians. Named Crazy Quilt, she specializes in this trope. It works quite well the first time she's used in the fourth round against Rapunzel, but in the finals, Chimera merely slaps her away; Chimera had already experienced much worse than bad singing.
• Izumi Maki of Martian Successor Nadesico, as shown in the Beauty Contest when her act is singing a song while playing her ukelele. Somehow she took this to make a living by the time of the Prince of Darkness movie, and she's still as bad as before.
• In the beginning of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, Lucia tries to use a song as thanks in accordance with mermaid customs and ends up causing an earthquake. She's also (inexplicably) able to sing microphone static too. After getting back the pearl that controls her Magic Music, she can sing well (not that the enemies think so). And she was always far better than Caren, a completely unintentional example.
• In Mission: Yozakura Family, Mutsumi's voice is angelic, but she's completely tone deaf and unable to control her pitch. All of her attempts to sing knock out all nearby animals save Goliath and causes flowers to wilt. Taiyo describes it as "the world ending" and all of her siblings save Kyoichiro shudder in fear of her inability to sing, especially since they all have Super-Senses.
• In Monster Rancher the anime series, the gang is trapped on board a pirate ship whose crew are ghost monsters who can't be physically hit, so Suezo goes below deck to the ship's speaker system and starts singing. It's so bad that everyone — including the ghosts — starts writhing in pain. Captain Horn has finally had enough and teleports down there:
  Horn: What are you doing with that racket?!
  Suezo: Oh, hey there Horn, I'm just trying to sing to scare the ghosts off. I was just getting warmed up.
  Horn: Your singing has the whole crew looking like they're going through the bends! Here, let me give it a try.
  Ghosts: Oh, Crap! face
• Kashima from Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is The Ace at most everything she turns her hand to — except singing, which can leave unfortunate listeners trembling on the floor with their hands clutched over their ears. She's ashamed of it because she's normally so good at things.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi has Shirabe, a Musical Assassin who apparently doesn't sound all that great, but that doesn't stop her abilities from being extremely deadly. After the Mundus Magicus arc, we learn that Kotarou and Negi aren't that good at singing either.
• In one episode of Nichijou, eight-year old Professor and her robot Nano are playing on trumpets. They sound awful — until you realize that the Professor is blowing into her horn but not actually making any noise. It's Nano who sounds awful.
• Aoi from Night Raid 1931 is horrible at playing the violin, but he doesn't let that bother him.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Jigglypuff is an inversion. Her lullaby is so good that any person or Pokémon that hears it falls asleep. She doesn't appreciate that at all, and she draws on the faces of her sleeping victims. She wanders the world following the heroes, trying to find someone who can hear her entire song. When she finally finds a Pokémon who was immune to sound-based techniques, she later finds it knocked out from battle, figures he fell asleep too, and resigned herself to never finding that being who can stay awake.
  • In season 10, Pikachu forms a band with himself on cello, Buizel on saxophone, Turtwig on drums, and Sudowoodo on piano. Staravia wasn't a big fan.
• In Q.E.D., while So Touma is a genius in many ways, he's never sung in karaoke before. It turns out, his singing is so bad that it petrifies those who hear it. But he finds that he enjoys it, much to Kana's chagrin.
• Downplayed in Revolutionary Girl Utena with Kozue, who isn't a terrible pianist but is definitely mediocre compared to her much more skilled brother Miki. Miki himself has happy memories of the two of them playing perfect duets together, but there's clearly heavy Nostalgia Filter at play on his end.
• Saber Marionette J: Subverted with Hanagata, who in an episode tries to find something he's good at to prevent his father from taking him away, and he decides to take to singing and playing music. He's actually not that bad at it, but he picked up the nighttime when the whole neighborhood wants to sleep and they don't appreciate being woken up.
• Samurai Champloo: Unsurprisingly, Jin turns out to be just as bad at music as he is at everything else that isn't swordplay when he needs to disguise himself as a geisha in one episode (It Makes Sense in Context). The fact that the "shamisen" he was playing was actually his sheathed katana disguised as an instrument didn't help matters at all.
• Kanata is not a particularly good bugler when Sound of the Sky begins, so she joins the army to learn how to play.
• Megumi in Special A, who normally communicates by Talking with Signs, got a chance to sing for Kei's birthday in the first episode. Her singing caused a minor explosion over the school and caused the birthday boy to go pale. Everyone else put in earplugs before she began singing.
• In Tamagotchi, Mametchi's awful singing has his friends covering their ears in agony, with only Himespetchi and Melodytchi being able to tolerate it (the former due to her crush on him). He later gains the ability to sing properly via the Melody Charm, and later on in Tamagotchi! Yume Kira Dream he eventually learns how to sing properly without the need for any charms or anything.
• De Niro from They Are My Noble Masters sometimes tries to use his sound system for musical purposes, which never works since it's actually built to emanate destructive waves.
• Princess Kaguya from Touhou is described as this in the gag series Inaba of the Moon & Inaba of the Earth. Reisen refers to her playing as "sonic weaponry" and even Kaguya admits "I did take down a bunch of people once". Making matters worse, she somehow did this while playing air biwa.
• Akina in UFO Princess Valkyrie is terrible at karaoke. It's barely survivable when she's got a backup-team of catgirl gogo-dancers distracting you from the actual singing, but without them, it's so bad that when Hydra is first thrown into the Punishment Dimension, the hell of her imagining is being strapped to a chair while Akina sings her Image Song.
• In Yandere Kanojo, the piano-playing ghost Kuroko can't move on to the next life until someone recognizes the piece of music she's playing. Just one problem — she's agonizingly bad at it. Reina and the gang listen for hours, writhing on the floor the whole time, and still can't make heads or tails of the song.

Asian Animation

• Bread Barbershop: Wilk's singing about Monday in a couple episodes causes everyone around him to cover their ears or otherwise react negatively.
• Invoked in the Noonbory and the Super 7 episode "Double Trouble": the evil Noonbory clone plays a trumpet poorly on purpose to annoy Jetybory.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: There are at least a couple episodes, one being episode 100, in which Wolffy tries to sing his own version of the show's theme song, only for his singing to sound really awful and awkward.
• Simple Samosa:
  • Vada is shown to be absolutely awful at playing the violin in the episode "Cultural Programme", to the point that it causes car crashes. The townsfolk of Chatpata Nagar, ironically enough, like his playing better than the legitimately good violin music Dhokla "plays" as part of an effort to prevent Vada from playing his horrible music at the Cultural Programme.
  • Mayor Royal Falooda's singing in "Kohra Ka Keher" has everyone in the town hall fleeing from the noise. It also breaks the lenses of Cham Cham's glasses and, later on, destroys the town hall.

Card Games

• Harpies in Munchkin. "Their music is really, really bad."

Comedy

• British comedian Les Dawson on the piano. He regularly managed the amazing feat of playing a tune, and not getting a single note right, but you could still tell what the tune was. That's the sort of badness it takes real talent to achieve.
• Orchestra joke:
  "What do you do with someone who can't read music?"
  "Give him two sticks and make him a drummer."
  "And if he can't keep rhythm?"
  "Take away one stick and make him the triangle player."
  "And if he still can't play?"
  "Give him the other stick and make him the conductor!"

Comic Books

• Cacofonix the bard from Asterix is an absolutely horrid singer. The entire village conspires to keep him from singing, to the point of tying him up and gagging him whenever they have a celebration (i.e. the end of every book). The blacksmith, Fulliautomatix, is always trying to shut him up with a sledgehammer; if not him, the gods themselves will throw a Bolt of Divine Retribution. In later parts of the series, he can start horrible rainstorms with his singing, and he's implied to be ancestor of bad musicians everywhere. His exploits include:
  • In The Mansions of the Gods, Asterix uses him to clear out the Roman civilians by having him move in with them.
  • The "Normans" (i.e. Vikings) come to Gaul to learn fear, a concept they cannot understand. The Gauls throw everything they have at them, including a severe beating from their strongest men, but only one thing teaches them to fear: Cacofonix's singing.
  • In Asterix the Gladiator, Cacofonix is brought into the circus to be fed to the lions, but his bad singing scares the beasts off. Asterix and Obelix were present, but didn't even bother to try and save him since they already suspected this would happen.
  • In Asterix and the Magic Carpet, a Fakir from India comes to request his assistance because his country has not had rain in all of its rainy season and only the bard's horrible singing voice can drive the sky to torrential downpour. Surprise! It works.
  • The page image comes from Asterix and the Secret Weapon and was an attempt at heavy metal ("an anacreontic ode transcending the verbal dimension"). It caused a near-apocalyptic storm that caused most of the animal population of the forest to run away, including a dragon.
  • However, it is implied that Cacofonix isn't that bad at playing his lyre. It is the singing voice, that is the problem. And even so, two characters in two relatively early stories enjoy even that. Justforkix in "Asterix and the Normans" tells him to go to Lutetia (Paris), where he could become a success, and Pepe in "Asterix in Spain" likes his singing as well, because it reminds him of his home in Spain (and especially of the goats)!
  • In the video game Asterix & Obelix XXL, upon hearing that the Romans had Cacofonix chained up, gagged, and locked in a soundproof dungeon, Obelix's response is "Oh, why didn't we ever think of that?"
• Bianca Castafiore in the Tintin books is a professional opera singer, but judging by other characters' reactions, she's dreadful. She's also Giftedly Bad and will sing at full blast at any opportunity. The only characters who don't mind her are Professor Calculus (who is "slightly hard of hearing") and Colonel Sponsz (who wants to get into her knickers). Hergé himself hated opera and found it ridiculous; he based the diva on his Aunt Mimi, a similarly shrill singer.
• Gaston Lagaffe is an interesting example, as he's not bad at playing music per se — rather, his music is painful because he insists on using eldritch homemade instruments. After he "tuned" a violin for a friend, it produced a shrieking sound that could paralyze people. His buddies aren't any better; once, during a rehearsal, they caused the floor to cave in.
• Peewit, in Peyo's Johan and Peewit. His natural ability for inflicting musical pain only gets worse when he accidentally obtains a magical six-holed flute of smurf origin that can force people to dance uncontrollably until they drop from exhaustion. He's so bad that at the beginning of the same album, when a traveling salesman comes to the castle and begins unloading musical instruments, the horrified king banishes him with threats of hanging.
• Monica from Monica's Gang is awful with instruments, either because she simply plays them out of tune or her super strenght causes them to break when she barely touches them. She also has a horrible singing voice that is so loud, it could be heard (and cringed upon) by astronauts
• The Smurfs: Harmony Smurf can make any instrument sound painfully out of tune, even a triangle. For the sake of experiment, the other Smurfs once allowed him to direct their orchestra: he made every last one of them play wrong. They even once gave him a music box to hold. He made it play wrong. Farmer Smurf deliberately uses Harmony's bad music playing to bring on the rain in "The Finance Smurf".
• Preservers in ElfQuest love to sing. Nobody else loves hearing them. Cutter once asked Petalwing to sing for Rayek, just to torment him.
• Dickie Duncan in Lori Lovecraft: The Road to Kadath is a past-his-prime crooner whose singing is so bad it cause gulls to flee to someplace quieter (like Brooklyn), rats to cringe and cover their ears, and moths to suicide by plunging into candle flames. Eventually a horde of demons drag him off when he tries singing to them.
• In Archie's TV Laugh-Out #2 (June, 1970), Sabrina's keyboard playing left a lot to be desired. But the gang needed a keyboardist, so when it came down to performing at a concert, Sabrina uses her witchcraft to play like a champion. Reggie then discovers the keyboard was unplugged and wonders how Sabrina played it. She handwaves it as ultimate talent.
• In a Josie and the Pussycats comic, the group searches for an opening act for their next tour, and they find one performer who is an exceptional guitarist, but when she gets up on stage and tells the audience that she's going to sing, her singing is so bad that almost all of the audience members leave and the Pussycats play to an empty venue. This is fixed after the band tells the sound technician to turn up the guitar so her singing can't be heard.
• In the side stories of Paperinik New Adventures, Billy Paganino is the only gangster who actually keeps a violin in his violin case. However, he plays it so badly that Angus Fangus demands he replaces it with something less lethal - like a tommy gun, for instance.

Comic Strips

• Garfield:
  • The titular fat cat himself can't sing, but he enjoys doing so. He likes to go on fences at the dead of night and sing which results in him getting pelted with stuff by audiences or humans who are sleeping (their success rate of getting Garfield varies per strip). Garfield's dancing hasn't found much acclaim either.
  • Jon is shown to be a terrible singer too, given that he got a police fine for disturbing the peace and had his mouth restrained with a scarf when he went Christmas caroling. Many other strips, such as this one◊, have Garfield and Odie reacting negatively to his singing. Notably, this was averted in the animated TV specials and Garfield and Friends, as both Lorenzo Music (Garfield) and Thom Huge (Jon) had decent singing voices.

Fan Works

• The Bolt Chronicles:
  • In "The Concerto," Penny is shown to be a horrible clarinet player. She's so bad that the conductor of the concert band banishes her to the last chair position in the bottom clarinet group, as well as seriously considering encouraging her to try out for the school choir instead. She ropes Bolt and Mittens into accompanying her home music-making sessions — and ironically, they're more accomplished than Penny is.
  • In "The Blackbird", Mittens isn't impressed with the title character's singing ability.
    Mittens: Now he's singing. "Pook-pook-pook! Pook-pook-pook!" If you can call that a song.
• A Diplomatic Visit: As noted in chapter 6 of the second sequel, Diplomacy Through Schooling, Discord was this on purpose, having performed a horrific attempt at karaoke during Twilight and Spike's welcome-home party.
• The First Saniwa: Nikkari plays the èrhú – Chinese violin – his playing is grating, and he doesn't know it.
• Terb the bard in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World is a Dreadful Musician with a magical lute. Only professional musicians are immune to it and can hear the music for what it really is—and George is so annoyed by the pub crowd's approval of the lousy music that he gets up on stage with his guitar to show everyone what real playing is.
• RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: Trixie, while not truly awful, has a limited repertoire, and what little she can sing, she can barely remember, so she usually just sings the same bits over and over.
• In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, the Guild of Assassins believes talent for the Profession runs in families and is in the blood. Therefore Famke Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons gets an automatic school place. Her Assassin mother knows the School believes a well-rounded Assassin should be musically literate and sets great value on this. Therefore from an early age. Famke is given piano lessons. The problem is - as her teacher notes, she is to the piano what B.S. Johnson was to good design and great architecture. Famke's piano-inhumation is a problem throughout her First Year at the school, until the Head of Music has an inspiration and moves her to a speciality that suits her musical and personal inclinations perfectly.
• BlazBlue Alternative: Remnant: Ruby is able to convince Yang to let Penny be the DJ for the school dance, but her music is loud and bad enough to hurt Blake and Makoto's ears from across campus. However, Ren notes during Blake's intervention in Chapter 49 that she's been frequently practicing and improving since then. By the time the dance rolls around, she's gotten good enough to be considered a pretty decent DJ.
• Anyone: Nana weaponises her horrible husical skills as a form of Cool and Unusual Punishment. She takes advantage of Izuku being completely immobile and gagged to grab a trobone and blow his ears out for stealing One For All.
• Atomic Number 79: Krillin is terrible at singing but goes all out at karaoke anyway. Vegeta describes his singing as bad enough to kill cats.

Films — Animation

• Treasure of Swamp Castle: The Baron's daughter drives the flute player to tears and he bends the flute out of grief.
• Scuttle from The Little Mermaid believes a smoking pipe is a musical instrument and tries to play it. Later, when he tries to create a romantic mood for Ariel and Eric by singing, Eric remarks, "Someone should find that poor animal and put it out of its misery." He briefly joins other singers in the "Kiss the Girl" sequence, but they force his beak shut.
• Cinderella's stepsisters, Drizella on vocals and Anastasia on flute, drive Lucifer the cat to seek refuge in another room, where Cinderella is secretly putting them to shame with her own singing. They're not off-key, but Drizella's voice is too nasally, and Anastasia's flute playing is too shrill.
• The aforementioned Peewit is still one of these in The Smurfs and the Magic Flute. It's only when he gets his hands on the magic flute that he ever plays a decent tune, and also at the end of the movie when he has a fake copy of the magic flute.
• Warren T. Rat in An American Tail plays a very cringe-worthy rendition of "Beautiful Dreamer" on his violin during the sewer scene. He claims it's because his nose keeps getting in the way. Granted, this may be justified, as he is wearing a fake rat nose.
• Garth from Alpha and Omega is a horrid howler (howling being like singing to the wolves). Every time he sings, stunned birds drop out of the sky. While at first he seems to think he's good at it, he later admits he knows how awful he is. Lilly manages to teach him how to howl wonderfully, in the process causing them to fall in love.
• In Megamind, just because Metro Man wanted to be a musician doesn't mean that he is any good at it. Granted, he was previously constantly occupied with saving Metro City, so he might not have had any time to practice and improve yet.
• King Julian in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa tries to whistle, but only manages to blow raspberries.
• Mumble, The main character of Happy Feet is the only penguin among his peers that can't sing to save his life. His voice actor, Elijah Wood, is actually a pretty decent singer in real life.
• In the Novelization of Turning Red, Tyler is stated to be so bad at playing the trumpet his music teacher bumped him down by three chairs—and there are only four people in his section.
• Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats: Amy Vandergelt has a habit of singing variations on "Tomorrow" from Annie, but her singing is physically painful to Top Cat and the rest of the gang. Worse, she doesn't seem to realize it.

Films — Live-Action

• Some versions of Sherlock Holmes make him a painfully bad violinist. In the original stories he's quite skilled, although he tends to play endlessly when thinking or bored, to Watson's annoyance. The literary canon explains that Holmes is quite talented but usually can't be motivated to attempt an actual tune. Most of the time, he just listlessly scrapes away with the bow while his mind is elsewhere, and he barely seems to realise he's doing it.
• A Japanese interactive film Super Voice World features the "player" character meeting various voice actors on his way to becoming one himself. Too bad his singing evokes visions of two nerds (played by Yamaguchi Kappei and Matsumoto Yasunori) taking off each other's glasses and falling on the floor in each other's embrace (no, it doesn't really make sense in context, either), shatters glass, kills goldfish, makes flowers wither, sends producers to the hospital and causes bad emotional trauma to the three poor girls who asked him to sing in the first place — they hide behind furniture and threaten him with fruits afterwards.
• Subverted in High Fidelity where Jack Black's character's band, Sonic Death Monkey, has been built up for the entire third act as a raucous punk/thrash metal band. They finally appear playing smooth R&B Standards, and sound great.
• Mark and the members of his garage band in Welcome to the Dollhouse. Case in point is the infamous "Happy Anniversary" song.
• Played with during the "camp battle" scene in American Pie Presents: Band Camp. The MC is challenged to a musical "duel". He's recently taken up the triangle. His competitor, of course, is much better. Then the MC pulls out an instrument he, unexpectedly, plays well.
• In Take the Money and Run, this is the result of attempts to teach Virgil to play the cello. As his instructor puts it, "He had no conception of the instrument. He was blowing into it." It doesn't help that he tries to play cello in a marching band.
• In the comedy Water (1985), Billy Connolly plays a communist rebel who's sworn never to speak until his island nation is free, so he communicates by singing. Unfortunately he's not very good at it, so when it's time for him to address the United Nations they're unimpressed, until a cameo appearance by George Harrison and Ringo Starr with their band "The Singing Rebels" earns him a standing ovation.
• The singers at the first wedding in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The credits even list them as "Frightful Folk Duo".
• The Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau is the archetypal Clueless Detective, and "playing the violin" is one of many things he isn't good at.
• Billy Madison: Billy and Eric compete in the musical round of an "Academic Decathlon." Eric wears a tuxedo and plays the violin beautifully. Then Billy, dressed in his street clothes, blows into his clarinet — and toots out a horribly off-key, screechy note. He smiles sheepishly, points to Eric and says "He's good."
• Florence Foster Jenkins staring Meryl Streep explores the true life story of the worst singer ever to play Carnegie Hall. She seemed unaware of her Giftedly Bad status, but many enjoyed it (the Carnegie Hall gig sold out). The brave can search for recordings of her on YouTube. It should be worth noting that she actually was a decently talented pianist, until syphilis crippled her left hand.
• The title guys from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a.k.a. the Wyld Stallyns, are horrible at playing guitar, but it's their music that portends the salvation of the future. At the end of the second film (Bogus Journey), they turn out to be...well, excellent.
• Rio Lobo: Old Man Phillips plays the mouth harp, and he plays it badly enough to be bribed to stop.
• The Getting of Wisdom: When one of the girls at the boarding school, Lilith, is asked to sing a song she'd recently learned, she delivers a badly off-key performance.
• Get Ready to Be Boyzvoiced: All three members of the Boy Band Boyzvoice are absolutely incompetent musicians who are unable to sing on-key without studio assistance.
• Raising the Wind:
  • According to Rutherford, his first three symphonies were considered to be terrible and shocking.
  • When Sir Benjamin fills in for first bassoon while Malcolm is conducting, he plays far too loud and drowns everyone else out.
• Mexican Hayride: While trying to blend in with some other musicians in a mariachi band, Bascom plays a trombone, only to mangle his attempts at doing so. He's not any better with a piccolo when he tries that instead.

Literature

• Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger books:
  • Jon-Tom, the eponymous Spellsinger, can work magic with his music — but he has absolutely no vocal talents. He still sings, because his magical abilities require singing to work. He once describes his singing attempts as sounding like a cross between Angus Young and a sex-starved moose.
  • In Son of Spellsinger, Jon-Tom's son Buncan is even worse. Fortunately, though, he teams up with two of Mudge's kids, Squill and Neena, who are much better singers.
  • The villain from the eighth book makes Jon-Tom sound like a multiple-Grammy winner. In fact, his entire Evil Plan is to destroy good music so that people will have to listen to him.
• The entire Smythe-Smith family in Julia Quinn's Bridgerton series. An entire family of girls with no musical talent, and three-quarters of the family are in denial about it enough to insist that all of the eligible maidens play a musicale every year.
• Discworld is fond of this trope:
  • In Lords and Ladies, it's revealed that Nanny Ogg's baths are accompanied by singing so loud and dreadful they cause everyone in her village to seek shelter. Animals forced to endure it unprotected produce curdled milk afterwards. Whereas opera singers can shatter glass with their voice, Nanny Ogg can clean it. Making it worse is that the tin bath she uses amplifies it to the point you can hear it from a good distance up the mountains.
  • Christine in Maskerade doesn't so much sing as shriek the words of opera songs ("Kwesta?! Mallydetta!!"); however, she looks the part and has genuine "star quality", so she is chosen over the supernaturally talented Agnes in the end. Christine and Agnes are, of course, an inversion of Christine and Carlotta in The Phantom of the Opera, although in most versions the latter is more overblown and past her prime than dreadful.
  • Death is likewise a terrible musician. He has tried to learn the violin and banjo at various points, but is inherently unable to be creative and always fails. Death at one point came close to ending the universe in Soul Music by playing a magical guitar. That was the catastrophic combination of the nature of the player and the divine quality of the instrument in question. This was entirely intentional and done for a very good cause.
  • Soul Music features an entire band of these, who flail away at their instruments so poorly that the drummer is actually prone to missing the drums entirely.
  • In The Wee Free Men, the Nac Mac Feegle gonnagles use the Mousepipes (a.k.a. bagpipes) as a weapon of war. About the only thing worse is their poetry, which would make Vogons curl up in pain.
  • In Small Gods, Brutha's singing is so awful that he receives special dispensation to be excused from choir practice. The music master says it puts him in the mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. Om himself (holy horns) compares it to the lamentations of the plague-stricken.
  • In Pyramids, Ptraci is on page 5 of her dulcimer instruction book Little Pieces for Tiny Fingers and can almost play "The Goblins' Picnic". The late king, however, enjoyed her music, in a way. Life seemed so much better once she stopped.
• Naughty: Nine Tales of Christmas Crime: In "Naughty," the Reptile sounds like he has emphysema when he tries to sing and Arlo and Hannah end up singing off-key while trying to improvise a number for their Christmas carpooler disguises.
• Redwall:
  • Dorothea Duckfontein Dillworthy: "To describe the haremaid's voice as being akin to a frog trapped beneath a hot stone would have been a great insult, to both frog and stone." She also plays the "harecordion", which apparently sounds like a rusty hinge even before she accidentally soaks it in cider. Her two fanboys, Southpaw and Bobweave, apparently genuinely love her music, while everyone else flees at the mere suggestion that she's about to sing. The first time she breaks out the harecodion, a mole hurls himself into the river to escape the noise.
  • Captain Slipp and Blaggut, a pair of searats, are asked to sing at one point in The Bellmaker. Not only do they both suck at it, their choice of song is so gory it makes the Dibbuns cry.
• In A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Austere Academy, Vice Principal Nero forces the academy's students to listen to hours of his horrendous violin playing. Naturally it's a Historical In-Joke: mad Emperor Nero also inflicted his astounding lack of talent on his unfortunate subjects. In his case, complaining about the racket meant death.
• Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: Mary Bennet is quite the terrible singer. Her father has to pry her away from the pianoforte at Mr. Bingley's ball, to spare the other guests. Adaptations tend to make her even worse than the book, failing to realize that her flaw was that she was pretentious and Giftedly Bad; Lizzie isn't much better as a musician, but she knows her talent level.
• The Heralds of Valdemar series has a song about a Countess whose singing was so terrible (and whose personality was so abusive) that she wound up stuffing her lute down her throat.
• Alastair Reynolds' standalone Noir Alternate History novel Century Rain averts this trope. In an early scene, the protagonist is walking into a superior's office while he plays a violin, as her Internal Monologue notes how grating and painful the music is. It is then revealed that she, along with a large portion of the rest of the human race, were infected with a designer-disease called "amusica", which prevented people from enjoying music, to ruin their side's morale.
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe gives us the band Disaster Area, the loudest sound of any kind in the known universe. Host planets to their gigs are largely left in ruins. The only positive gig was on a planet where the music turned a vast desert into a verdant field by flipping the planet's crust like a pancake, and it was also loud enough to cure the locals of their telepathy.
• "Two Kinds", a story from The Joy Luck Club, has Jing-Mei learn how to play the piano very badly. In front of a large audience including her parents, no less. She admits that she could have become a good pianist, but was so irritated at her mother forcing her to be a "prodigy" against her wishes that she deliberately set out to be this trope instead.
• Harris from Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing About the Dog) drove many accompanying pianists mad with his awful singing, to the amusement of the crowd.
• When the 597th Valhallan arrives on Gravalax in For the Emperor, Cain describes the regimental band as:
  [T]humping and parping away at If I Should Forget Thee, O Terra, as though they had a grudge against the composer.
• Breq, the protagonist of Ancillary Justice and its sequels, loves choral music and often sings to herself. Unfortunately for everyone around her, she has a terrible voice.
• Justin Bieber is portrayed as this in Travis Shorts. He's so bad that his music actually makes people go deaf.
• According to Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle, every citizen of Mechanicsburg is required to learn to play at least one musical instrument by law. This law was passed to punish the citizens for a very brief rebellion. The Heterodyne at the time didn't want to kill people for a revolt so minor, but couldn't allow it to go unpunished, so he arranged for every future generation to be tortured by the sound of children trying to learn to play.
• Karyl of The Dinosaur Lords is a dreadful, dreadful musician, and Rob winces any time he's forced to listen to him. Karyl tries to defend himself by pointing out that it's not easy to learn how to play when you have only one working hand.
• Larklight: Myrtle is one to the cactus creatures, as she drives them away from her with her hymn recitations.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: In A Storm of Swords the musicians at the wedding of Edmure Tully and Roslin Frey are noted to be awful. One song is played so terribly Catelyn Stark and the Greatjon disagree on what it is. Their utter lack of skill is probably because they aren't musicians, but soldiers about to kill everyone present.
• Spy School: Vladimir Gorsky and Murray Hill are both noted as being such awful singers that its physically painful to listen to them.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: When Percy attends the opening ceremony at Goode High School, the marching band is playing a fight song that sounds like "somebody beating a bag of cats with a metal baseball bat".
• The Worst Witch: In The Worst Witch Strikes Again, Enid decides to liven up a dull chanting lesson by deliberately singing out of tune, causing Mildred to have fits of helpless laughter.
• Sherlock Holmes is actually a subversion. Most of the time he plays with the violin to have something to do with his hands while he thinks, but when he can be persuaded to stop making noise and start actually playing music, he is decent to good.
• The short poems in Always Coming Home include two named "A Vaunting" and "A response", with one side claiming their musicians are wonderful, and the other... that it might be an exaggeration.

Live-Action TV

• Several NBC teen comedies like California Dreams have a character horribly tone-deaf trying to join a band and the rest trying to give them "lessons" rather than admit how bad they are. Subverted on City Guys, where Cassidy's horrible singing before an open-night audition has her bandmates decide it's better to let her perform alone rather than be embarrassed in public. At which point Cassidy reveals she's a great singer and was pulling this just to perform solo.
• In an episode of ICarly, Carly finds out that her crush plays guitar, so she invites him to perform on her webshow. Though his playing is decent, his singing is so bad that Freddie frantically searches for pitch-correction software to make his singing more palatable to the viewers.
• Edith Bunker of All in the Family tends to sound like a cat being tortured when she sings. She also loves to sing, much to Archie's chagrin.
• In 'Allo 'Allo!, when Rene's wife Edith prepares to sing in the cafe, all the patrons pass round cotton wool (or cheese) to stuff in their ears. ^note (Cast members have recalled in interviews that Carmen Silvera truly was completely tone deaf, so her terrible singing is not an affectation.)
• In Auction Kings, Cindy is a downplayed example. When a drum set comes in, Cindy reveals she has a drum set at home and knows how to play. It turns out she knows how to play exactly one beat, which she does continually.
• Babylon 5:
  • G'Kar ends up having to serve some time in the station's jail. He passes the time by singing, which causes the station population to mistakenly believe Station Security is torturing him. He finds this hilarious when he is told about it.
  • In another episode a peeved technomage punishes Londo Mollari for spying on him by unleashing all manner of technobanes on Londo's appartment, including a non-stop broadcast of Narn opera. Both Londo and his aid Vir are in visible pain from how horrible it is.
• In The Big Bang Theory Raj and Howard form a duo called "Footprints on the Moon". They play once at he comic book store, and once at a children's hospital "until they told us to stop".
  • Later Bert the geologist joins them as lead guitar and they play a Bar Mitzvah- badly.
• The Brittas Empire: Gordon Brittas is revealed to be one of these with the piano in the episode "Mums and Dads". Apparently, his wife had to burn their piano just to stop him from playing it. We later on in the episode get to hear him play a horrible rendition of "Knock Three Times" on the piano, which is shown to cause mass cringing amongst those present.
• Oz of Buffy the Vampire Slayer maintains this opinion of himself and his band, saying that a review that describes them as playing "as if they have plump Polish sausages taped to their fingers" is fair. In reality they're not bad at all, their music provided by alternative rock group Four Star Mary.
• The episode "La Orquesta" of El Chavo del ocho has the kids trying (key word being trying) to play some instruments in the courtyard, which naturally results in Don Ramón coming out to complain about the noise. Doña Florinda allows them to continue, but does make a point of asking how long they're going to play so she can come back when they're done.
• All the members of Bad News: Vim (vocals and lead guitar), Den (rhythm guitar), Spider (drums), and Collin (bass) from The Comic Strip Presents are individually examples of this, as well as the band being self described as "the worst rock and roll band in the world". There were two episodes made about them ("Bad News Tour" and "More Bad News"), and they also released an album, which was mostly the band bickering and included one and a half takes of the worst version of Bohemian Rhapsody as well as some deliberately awful original songs.
• Community: In "Regional Holiday Music" the Glee Club parody episode, Mr. Rad personally recruits each of the study group for their singing talent, while casting Britta as a (mute) tree. Abed later decides to sabotage the Glee Club by convincing Britta to sing all the parts because "talent doesn't matter when you have Glee". Ten seconds into the performance her off-key singing has driven Mr. Rad to insanity and managed to ban Glee from the campus forever.
• In the fourth wall-breaking Doctor Who special "Music of the Spheres", the Doctor tries composing a symphony inspired by planetary rotation synthesized into music through the TARDIS harmonics filters. Let's just say the universe makes better music than Ten. But at least we get the image of him conducting an orchestra with the sonic screwdriver.
• Private Dobbs, the inept fort bugler from F Troop.
• Frasier:
  • Frasier solves his insecurity complex in "The Perfect Guy" is by revealing his Foil to be one of these.
  • Daphne is such an awful pianist that her previous teacher of eight years was apparently Driven to Suicide.
• Nick Andolpolis, of Freaks and Geeks. His audition in the "I'm with the Band" episode is at once one of the funniest and most painful Cringe Comedy moments on a show that's full of them.
• Friends:
  • Phoebe is known for playing the guitar in Central Perk and is sometimes (but not always) portrayed as such. Her biggest failing is in her lyrics, which are either terrifyingly banal (like "Smelly Cat") or terrifyingly tasteless (like a Christmas carol she wrote about her mom dying).
  • Ross's FX-heavy keyboard compositions ("The Sound") in "The One Where Chandler Crosses a Line" strike everyone except for Phoebe this way. When he tries to learn how to play the bagpipes in "The One With Joey's New Brain" for Monica and Chandler's wedding the results are similar: everyone hates it except Phoebe, who attempts to sing along.
    Monica: You can't play bagpipes at our wedding!
    Ross: How did you know about that?
    Chandler: We could hear you all the way from our apartment!
    Ross: Were you the ones who called the cops?
    Chandler: That's not really important right now. What's important is that while we appreciate the gesture, we just don't feel that bagpipes are appropriate for our wedding.
    Ross: Why not?
    Chandler: Because we hate them.
  • In later seasons it's revealed that Ross and Chandler had a very bad rock band together in college, admittedly mostly to meet girls, which also didn't work. Chandler mentions a song Ross wrote about Rachel titled "Emotional Knapsack". Luckily the viewers never have to hear it.
• On Game Shakers, Double-G finally gets to do a song with his long-time idol Diana DeVane, the woman's manager insisting Double-G sign the contract guaranteeing Diana is paid no matter what. The song becomes a nightmare, as Diana's voice has been rendered to a horrific screech thanks to operations, and she's totally unware of it. The manager just shrugs and says that she lives off the past and it's okay by him.
• PJ and Emmett in Good Luck Charlie are shown to be incapable of both singing and playing an instrument in an episode where they enter a Battle of the Bands competition.
• In Happy Endings, Dave can technically play the guitar, but his songwriting is either terrible or obliviously inappropriate. The former represented by "Love to the Power of Love"; the latter, the awkwardly delivered chorus of "why don't you come, come, come, come, come, come, come... home to me."
• Colonel Klink of Hogan's Heroes is a horrendous violin player. This is a bit ironic, as his actor Werner Klemperer was apparently very talented at it.
• Kamen Rider Double had a one-off character named Jimmy Nakata, a street musician who invented a rock/rap fusion he calls called "spilk" — which consists of him wailing discordantly on a guitar and screaming at the top of his lungs. His singing makes everyone nearby drop to the ground in agony, kills birds in mid-flight, and even seems to cause earthquakes. Yet he's suspiciously still winning the American Idol-style contest he's in, even against opponents who were in real life members of AKB48. It turns out that his only fan, a girl who's in love with him, hired the Monster of the Week to rig the contest. But at the end, when Jimmy performs without the monster's influence, the judges admit his music was pretty dire, but they admire his passion and encourage him to keep at it.
• Debra Jo in Little Lunch. Her ear-piercing and tuneless recorder recitals can clear the room. Even Mrs. Goncher has been known to snatch the recorder out of her hands to stop her playing. She falls into the Giftedly Bad category, as she is convinced she is brilliant.
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide: While Ned is by no means a good musician, at least he's quite gifted compared to Cookie, who is unable to play a recorder and at the end, he's assigned the one instrument he can play properly... a triangle.
• Odd Squad:
  • Delivery Doug is an absolutely horrific rapper, and it shows in episodes where he sings his Leitmotif, "All I Really Want is Eggs".
  • To say nothing of the Villain People from "Music of Sound", who are terrible at making music in general. The first time Orla (disguised as their manager) hears them play as a Trash-Can Band, all she can do is stare at them in a completely confused manner. However, their terrible music is also Mind-Control Music, which they use to hypnotize everyone who comes to their concert so they can Take Over the World.
  • Gladys Plaidys, a villainess seen in "Orla's Birthday", is definitely not skilled at playing the bagpipes.
  • Randall the Creepy Fiddler, a Plant Person that the Dream Weaver generates as part of the Little O's nightmares in "In Your Dreams", doesn't play the fiddle that well, something that Orla points out.
  Orla: He clearly does not spend time practicing his craft.
  • In "Nature of the Sandbeast", during Omar's and Orla's tellings of how Dr. Dry got the eponymous creature's egg, they imagine the Singing Telegram singing a Soundcheck song and an opera piece, respectively. However, since the stories have all characters voiced by Omar and Orla, they sing the songs. And needless to say, they're not the best singers (which is quite weird in Orla's case, since she did a yodelling duet with Opal earlier in "Slow Your Roll").
• Uncle Albert from Only Fools and Horses certainly isn't the best pianist around, but Mike tolerates his piano playing on the grounds that it prevents people from noticing that the Nag's Head's jukebox has been broken for years.
• In Our Friends in the North Terry "Tosker" Cox is convinced he will one day front a successful rock band. He is encouraged by his relatively well-off parents, who buy him musical instruments and let his bands play in the pub they own. He only gives up on his dream when he reaches middle age and his then-wife, Mary, delivers a Reason You Suck speech about how mediocre he really is.
• In Peep Show, Jeremy and Super Hans play together in numerous bands, from Mama's Kumquat to The Hair Blair Bunch to Curse These Metal Hands to Man Feelings. It takes them eight series to accept that none of these bands were ever any good.
• Power Rangers:
  • Bulk is not much of a musician on any front except possibly rap, and while Skull may be an ace behind the keys of a piano (particularly with classical music), he is not a good rocker. Bulk and Skull once played so badly they burned out their amp. And Tommy Oliver, many-talented and badass though he may be, cannot sing to save his life.
  • Played with in Power Rangers Wild Force. The flute org is an absolutely amazing musician — if you're an org. To humans, his playing sounds like nails on a chalkboard. At the other end of the spectrum, beautiful human music sounds horrible to an org.
• Lister from Red Dwarf is so bad at playing the guitar that he's only allowed to play it outside the ship. The Red Dwarf is a spacecraft. This fact was once used as a plot point when Lister had an evil doppelganger. The false Lister played the guitar amazingly well, because it played as well as Lister thought he could, rather than as awfully as he actually could.
• Arnie Dogen on The Red Green Show is an accident-prone roofer/country singer who can barely carry a tune.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch and her two friends decide to form a band — except none of them knows how to play an instrument. Zelda checks on them during practice asking if someone was being strangled. Sabrina then has to resort to using Bottled Talent to make them better.
• Lt. Kevin Thomas Riley's off-key (and alien disease-affected) rendition of "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Naked Time".
  Riley: ONE MORE TIME!
  Kirk: Please, not again.
• Jimmy's band in True Jackson, VP. Appropriately, their name is "Diarrhea".
• One sketch in Welcome Freshman parodied the Prohibition era with student gangsters making bathtub bubblegum. When caught by the teachers, they defeat them by producing violin cases, from which they remove violins, which they then play very badly.
• The Beverly Hillbillies: Aunt Pearl's enthusiastic yet terrible yodeling is a Running Gag. Although she and her family are blissfully oblivious, the sound can shatter glass, get dogs howling in response, send a telephone receiver writhing across the table like an angry snake, and scare off traffic from a block away. Unfortunately, she also thinks it's a strong asset with which to woo the object of her affections.
• In one episode of The Munsters, Herman, under persuassion from his boss, has Eddie join the school orchestra with him on the trumpet. Unfortunately, despite Herman having him constantly practice, his playing is lousy. Eventually, Grandpa has enough and secretly gives Eddie a potion that makes him a fantastic trumpet player. Unfortunately, when Herman invites his boss over for dinner, Grandpa gets the formula for the potion wrong, turning Eddie into a pompous jazz musician, which Herman's boss hates, resulting in him getting fired.
• Young Sheldon: After learning that Albert Einstein played the violin to help him think, Sheldon decides to learn to play. The resulting screeching is said to drive the neighborhood dogs crazy.
• M*A*S*H: Ironically and somewhat tragically, noted classical music enthusiast Charles Winchester is a pretty bad musician himself. He has a deep appreciation for the art and those who have The Gift, with music sometimes providing him some solace in the middle of the warzone, and sadly notes, "I could play the notes, but I could never make the music."

Music

• Invoked by The Bonzo Dog Band on "Canyons of Your Mind" especially the guitar solo. Neil Innes was a very talented musician who purposely played an awful solo. See here.
• In "Those Magic Changes" from the original Grease musical, It starts out with this.
• Spoofed in the song by Flanders and Swann "A Song of Patriotic Prejudice", which contains the line "he sings far too loud, far too often, and flat", and the music suddenly changes to a flatter key.

Pro Wrestling

• WWE seems to have a thing to use this trope on their poor fans.
  • Jillian Hall had this as her gimmick.
  • In the early 90s, the theme song of The Mountie and The Quebecers was sung by the wrestlers themselves — poorly.
  • Every time the Foreign Wrestling Heel wants to sing his national anthem, he turns out to suck at it.
  • "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, who by his own admission "can't sing worth a damn", sang America The Beautiful in a duet with Lillian Garcia (who can sing quite well).
  • Randy Savage's Be a Man Rap CD.
  • Everybody hates Heath Slater's singing, except Michael Cole. This led to Slater, Drew McIntyre, and Jinder Mahal coming together as the Tag Team 3MB (3 Man Band).
• WCW wrestler "Heavy Metal" Van Hammer's initial gimmick was of a wrestling heavy metal guitarist. He wasn't very good at either. He would bring his guitar to the ring and do Air Guitar. Despite WCW pushing him as hard as they could, and despite his Real Life friendship with Diamond Dallas Page, he never really accomplished anything in WCW or anywhere else, never winning a title in any promotion.

Puppet Shows

• Don't Eat the Neighbours: Lucy when she starts to play the trumpet. At the end of the episode, it turns out her grandmother, whom Rabbit had encouraged her to follow but had never heard play, was also one of these.
• On an episode of Welcome to Pooh Corner, Tigger is always playing his guitar and insists on serenading all his friends. While he isn't terrible, exactly, his tempo is off, his guitar is always out of tune and the song he performs ("The Man in the Moon Is a Tigger") is pretty monotonous. When the others (politely) tell Tigger that he should practice before playing publicly, he insists that playing the guitar is "what Tiggers do best", and therefore he doesn't need to practice.
• Under the Umbrella Tree: Iggy the Iguana, similarly, wants to be a guitarist but can't keep focused on his lessons, always getting distracted into doing other things when he should be playing. So when he tries performing the song he's been "practicing", he sounds very rusty and Gloria and Jacob make fun of him.
• The Mr. Potato Head Show: Johnny Rottenapple even calls his own songs "My latest musical stain/puddle/onslaught"!

Radio

• Cabin Pressure: Arthur's attempt at singing sounds to Douglas and Martin more like someone trapping their hand in a car door. In fact, "singing" might be too generous. He just grunts the sounds at the top of his voice. (John Finnemore can sing, but in this case is engaging in a bit of Self-Deprecation).
• I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue
  • Every time Jeremy Hardy appeared, he demonstrated his lack of singing ability; it quickly developed into a Running Gag, with the chairman often announcing his turn "in a voice laden with doom" or saying he was only asking him to sing because his contract required it. After one particularly painful round of One Song to the Tune Of Another, an audience member shouted "More!" Three others immediately replied "LESS!" His character in the Spin-Off sitcom, You'll Have Had Your Tea, is the only one with a singing role, where his natural singing talents are combined with an excessively posh accent and 90s pop songs by Atomic Kitten.
  • This trait proves to be useful in "Inverurie Jones and the Thimble of Doom".
    Mrs Naughtie: There's only one way to tell the real Laird from the imposter. Ask him to sing.
    Dougal: Steady on! Steady on, Mrs Naughtie, there's only so much flesh and blood can stand!
  • In one round of "Pick-up Song" (where each panellist has to sing along to a well-known song which is then muted, and tries to still be in time with the recording when the sound comes back) Hardy managed to sing more or less in tune and the song ("Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now") came back on to reveal he was quite close to staying in time. Everyone reacted with astonishment.
    Tim Brooke-Taylor: Where the hell did that came from?! Your twin brother Jeremy couldn't sing at all!
    Jeremy: I've just realised, if I start singing in tune I'm finished! It'd be like the Elephant Man having a nose job!
  • Subverted with Colin Sell. The chairman and panellists make much of his supposedly terrible piano-playing, but in fact (as they know full well) he's a very good pianist being asked to play ridiculous things.
• Jack Benny on The Jack Benny Program was a Trope Codifier.
• The BBC Radio 4 sitcom The Music Teacher invoked this one at least Once an Episode.

Roleplay

• In Survival of the Fittest Spin-Off The Program, apparently Brigadier General David Adams is one of these, judging by a recent announcement where he randomly bursts into the Star Spangled Banner — the narration specifically states that he wasn't any good.

Tabletop Games

• The fan-made Cacophonic Bard Prestige Class is for Tabletop Games fans who want to try out this type of character in a Dungeons & Dragons game. It may be intentional, but the class has one tremendous drawback — due to the Charisma limit, the character's magic is unusable (even though the class supposedly continues progression in said magic). The reason this may be intentional is because canon states a bard's spells are cast through song. According to the description of the class, one of the Cacophonic Bard's abilities is to accommodate their shortcomings by using the second-highest stat in place of Charisma, as seen fit.
• Dungeons & Dragons proper has campestris, silly little Mushroom Men who like to endlessly repeat any songs they hear. Unfortunately, their singing voices are "an obnoxious, nasal falsetto," and campestris are prone to muddling the lyrics of songs ("Murray hada weedleam, hoose fleas was wideasno!"), so they largely exist for a DM to annoy their players "until he or she gets tired or the players start to throw things." However, their monster entry recommends that any PC who takes the trouble to teach campestris how to sing properly should be rewarded with some bonus XP, especially if the player gets the rest of the table laughing by being willing to sing the song their character is teaching the mushrooms.
• In one of the pre-written campaigns for Promethean: The Created, the players encounter a homeless man calling himself "Maestro Mike", who has a bunch of badly-maintained woodwind instruments hanging from his belt. He can be found in the park, "slaughtering the very concept of music", as the book puts it. His musical efforts are explicitly said to be rolled on a chance die (a "special" die you roll if your dice pool is reduced to zero by penalties, which gives a Dramatic Failure on a 1 and only succeeds on a 10 on a ten-sided die - in a game where 8 or better is usually a success).
• Done deliberately by the Slaaneshi Noise Marines of Warhammer 40,000: due to centuries of self-inflicted sensory abuse, they get a bigger kick from the hideous noises they produce than actually playing music. Their victims, on the other hand, are screwed.

Theatre

• In Orpheus in the Underworld, Orpheus is a terrible violin player, with his music being used as torture for Eurydice.

Video Games

• The main character in Augmented Fourth is thrown into the Orchestra Pit after the king violently objects to their performance of "Ode to a Duck".
• In Backyard Skateboarding, Achmed Khan sings "Skate Rock" horribly. However, the backing music is incredibly catchy.
• Baldurs Gate 3: Alfira the tiefling bard can be encountered in Act 1 trying to write a song in tribute to her fallen mentor. Her efforts are... horrifying. Depending on player choices, you can either assist her in several different ways, in which case she finishes the song and shows that she is actually a very beatiful singer, or you can smash her lute.
• Batman: Arkham Knight:
  • One of the characters featured is Johnny Charisma, a singer infected with the Joker's blood. While the player doesn't hear a song he sings to Batman because Batman is tripping on a combination of the Joker's blood himself and the Scarecrow's fear toxin, so he hallucinates the real Joker singing instead, once he's defeated, Robin expresses disbelief that he's a professional singer and that Alfred could do better—in a tone that suggested Alfred himself is a crappy singer.
  • From the same game, we also have Professor Pyg, whose attempts to sing along to his favourite opera music reach a truly cringeworthy level of off-key.
• In Commander Keen, one of the enemy-types you encounter in the final world of Invasion of the Vorticons is a little green guy who, according to the manual, "has the worst singing-voice in the galaxy, but believes that he has the best. Thus, he sings constantly." Their soundwave projectiles pass through solid barriers and kill you on contact, making them among the most dangerous foes that the player can face. In fact, they're so dangerous that Mortimer McMire has several of them attached to his Humongous Mecha as multidirectional weapon hardpoints.
• Crash Fever: When Caishen isn't sober, do NOT let her near the mic. Her singing is bad enough when drunk that it can knock out avatars within a very large radius.
• Don Mole of Dragon Quest VIII. His harp playing is so bad, it can stun everyone in battle, except for him. He digs his own funky tune, after all. After you beat him and take away his harp, his minions thank you for ending their aural torture.
• One of the Dark Brotherhood's targets in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an orc who has the dubious honor of being considered the worst Bard in Tamriel. So many people want him dead that Astrid actually has to draw a lottery to determine whose contract to honor.
• During one of the secret missions in Elite Beat Agents, the character goes to get singing lessons. This is represented by her being in a studio while a piano player coaches her along. Do poorly and she lets off such a horrific trio of 'LAs' that the plant on the piano dies, the windows to the studio shatter, the wall cracks and the poor piano player is covering his ears!
• Fitting her origins, Nero of Fate/EXTRA is pretty consistently shown to be an awful singer. She's very enthusiastic about it, to the point that her Noble Phantasm is a concert hall. Apparently, it's based on an incident from her life where she attempted to build a theater just so people could listen to her; when they started leaving, she locked them inside.
  • Another awful singer from the Fate series is Elisabeth Bathory, the infamous Blood Countess; this incarnation of herself wants to become a beloved Idol Singer, but her songs are hilariously off-key and off-beat, as if she can't decide if she wants to sing a song or recite a poem — but her Noble Phantasm doesn't need her to be good at singing, but simply needs her voice to be loud enough to weaponize. One Extra stage in Fate/Extella Link has her try to team up with Nero for a concert, and Hakuno has to put the kibosh on that. However, Fate/Grand Order implies that most of her horrendous singing is because she does so for her own gratification, and should she instead sing for someone else's sake, she manages to invert this trope surprisingly well, to the point she empowers the other person.
• Soleil from Fire Emblem Fates is said to be one in her profile. While the player never actually hears her sing, Soleil's regular voice clips can get rather high-pitched and loud, reinforcing the description somewhat.
• Timerra from Fire Emblem Engage is legendary as the "Racket of Solm" for this exact reason. In-game, it's her personal skill and lowers the crit rate of all enemies within 2 spaces. She seems fully aware that her singing isn't the greatest but keeps it up because it's fun, encouraging fellow royals Ivy and Diamant to join in during their supports. The results are... almost as bad.
• This trope is penalized in Grand Piano Keys, as every time you hit a wrong note, you can't play for a few seconds, and you lose some of your time.
• Kirby, in both his video games and cartoon series, has a "microphone" power that creates an extremely powerful attack. In the game, it instantly kills all enemies on the screen. In the cartoon series, it lets him defeat a ridiculous number of Monster of the Week-level foes all at once, because his singing is just that bad. It leaves the castle in ruins, and makes his own allies shiver in dread. And yet you can't help but love it. In the first game's manual, Kirby outright admits that he is bad at singing.
• In Mabinogi, Instrument Playing is a skill. People seem to think they should be paid for playing music. Some should be paid to stop. Bonus points for a midi-to-song-for-lute system.
• One ability of Miitopia's Pop Star class weaponizes this trope with the Out Of Tune ability, a discordant wail that damages all enemies while also applying Scratch Damage to all allies. It also has a more damaging variant, Way Out Of Tune.
• Zigzagged with Cyrus from Octopath Traveler. A tavern banter between him, Tressa, and Olberic has him mention that he's apparently a bad singer. When Tressa asks him for a demonstration, she falls into Stunned Silence, and Olberic states that she's "ruing her curiosity." However, there's some official artwork that shows him playing a piano, and Primrose and Tressa look happy about it. So Cyrus seems to be a terrible singer, but good at playing music.
• Partitio from Octopath Traveler II is also an awful singer. A conversation between him, Agnea, and Hikari has Agnea winning free drinks for the trio because her singing brought a bunch of customers to the tavern they're at. When Partitio tries the same trick, the tavern keeper says that his voice was bothering the other customers and asks him to leave.
• Harpy of the Puyo Puyo series is a notoriously horrid and noisy singer. So much so that in one of the short Puyo Puyo anime clips, she gives lessons to Serilly (who normally sings so beautifully, she captivates people) and makes her sing as awfully as her. However, in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, she is part of the DLC Packs that feature previously unplayable characters — including Sonic the Hedgehog — and has an alternate voice which actually has her singing on-key, but she's still rather noisy.
• Played with with Seana from Rabi-Ribi. There's nothing actually wrong with her singing, but all her performances turn into boss fights because she gets so into them that she starts flinging magic everywhere without even realizing it.
• The fourth boss in Ristar is a vulture-like bird whose singing is so bad it fires deformed musical notes at you and distorts the game's background music.
• Weaponized by Xavii in Sengoku Basara: one of his special attacks has him pulling out a hymnal and perform a little singing so off-tune and horrible it severely damages enemies caught in the attack, as well as smashing vehicles and damageable items.
• At one point in Shining in the Darkness you can meet a character named Krun, who offers to sing a song. The "song" is a dreadfully off-key cacophony, and afterwards other characters will talk about how horrible it was. The ending credits show him being booted out of the village.
• Shin Megami Tensei
  • In Shin Megami Tensei I, during demon negotiations, one of your options might be "Sing". Sometimes, the demons like it, and your hero's done a successful serenade. However, he might also be met with a response along the lines of, "ARGH! Shut up, I think I'm going to die!"
  • Aleph from Shin Megami Tensei II is a very bad singer, and will drive demons into a incoherent rage when he does so. Many believing he's trying to kill them.
  • In the original Persona, "Sing" is a negotiation option the MC and Elly have. As in its predecessors, some demons are less than entertained by your musical ability. In Elly's case, though, they tend to bitch about her choice of genre.
• In The Sims Medieval, a Sim can get the negative mood buff You Call That Music if they hear the court jester play the fiddle badly.
• This is the entire point of Team Chaotix's Team Blast attack in Sonic Heroes. They immediately give an impromptu rock concert, but their singing and instrument playing is so bad, it makes all nearby enemies explode into rings. Since collecting rings builds up your Team Blast meter, sometimes unleashing the Team Blast gives you enough rings to be able to immediately unleash it again.
• Defied by Pearl from Splatoon 2. Her singing voice isn't as "bad" as it is very, very loud. As the first Sunken Scroll in Hero Mode reveals, she caused a huge shockwave at the Annual Youth Folk-Singing Contest as a young girl, damaging the venue and destroying the speakers. To prevent incidents like this, she practices on Mount Nantai, away from civilization, to control her destructive voice. As a result, she's improved enough to be one half of the pop duo Off the Hook.
• Team Fortress 2 has Demoman's "Bad Pipes" taunt where he plays the bagpipes badly. Really badly. The strange thing is the original taunt submitted "True Scotsman's Call" has his playing the bagpipes beautifully with drums, flutes, pipes, and bagpipes playing along.
• A Game Mod for Unreal featured the Hanson Grenade, which stuck to the target and blasted "MMMBop" by Hanson continuously. It gave away your position, drained your health, and in the words of Cliff Bleszinski, "will drive your ass insane."
• Edy Nelson from Valkyria Chronicles is completely tone deaf. In the DLC episode "Enter the Edy detachment", if you get an A rank, she sings for her squad.
• In Vay, the heroes need to get a valuable gem from a legendary monster, who turns out to be willing to give it up in exchange for a song. None of the heroes turn out to be particularly good singers, so they go back to town and hire the traveling bard Lynx. Unfortunately for them, Lynx turns out to be not only a Dreadful Musician, but also Can't Take Criticism. Cue Boss Battle.
• WarioWare: D.I.Y. has the Record tutorial, with Penny Crygor having already made a verse for the Record Class song. However, when you press the play button, it is off, meaning that if that is to go by, Penny is awful at composing.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is a pianist who couldn't play a lick of piano as a cover for his actual job as professional poker player. It's frequently mentioned by the main characters that calling him a pianist is an insult to pianists everywhere, and examining the seat by the piano in the bar he works for will elicit a comment on how it's the most painful seat in the house.
• Kotomi from CLANNAD. Despite being a Teen Genius and being depicted calmly playing the violin in the anime's first opening, the terrible truth is revealed when Kotomi finally gets her hands on one: every time she plays, shockwaves emanate from the violin, glass cracks, lightbulbs burst, and everyone in the school collapses to the ground in agony. She thinks her music is pretty. She was apparently fine when she was a child, but after her parents died and she Never Got to Say Goodbye, she became a Giftedly Bad Cloudcuckoolander.
• Morgan from Double Homework eventually starts learning how to play guitar, and she is awful.
• Idol Hakkenden: Gogawa in Studio 2 wants to become a famous baseball singer, but he's terrible at singing, with it even being reflected by how out-of-tune it sounds in-game. He gets utterly outclassed by Erika's Miracle Voice.
• Invoked by the title character of Melody regarding the opening act for her favorite band. According to her, this act is going nowhere.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner
  • Coach Z is most often portrayed as a Dreadful Musician who overestimates his talent, but his Piss Take Raps vary in "quality" depending on the short.
  • Homestar Runner himself is usually not a very good singer, prone to not only being slightly off-key, but also to singing songs with bizarre and nonsensical Word Salad Lyrics that are further mangled by his speech impediment.
• Object Shows:
  • Inanimate Insanity has Pineapple, a faithful member in Spoiled Lemon. He may be good on the guitar, but NOT at singing. Here's a video to prove his bad talent, but bring some Brain Bleach.
  • And Brawl of the Objects has Pizza, a horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE singer. This is all revealed in BOTO's next star.
• Digital from RoboSplaat attempts to make a song, with his older brother Splaat pointing out he records a cat meowing and attempts to incorporate it into the song. "Attempt" being the key word here. The result does nothing to help with Digital being an Annoying Younger Sibling to Splaat.

Web Comics

• Elan from The Order of the Stick isn't so much a bad musician as an annoying one, who insists on providing lyrics to his bardic music ("Con-cen-trate good times, come on!"), often at inappropriate times ("Bluff, Bluff, Bluff, Bluff the stupid ogre!").
• In Adventurers!, Karn, listening to Gildward perform one of his songs, hypothesizes that its Suckiness Is Painful enough to damage enemies in combat.
• Paradox Space: According to Terezi, Kanaya is good at using a violin as an instrument of torture.
• Kathryn of The Adventures of Sue and Kathryn! is quite horrible with the recorder, and can't play a tune to save her un-life. She claims to be self-taught, and it shows.
• The protagonist of Harpy Gee is shown singing as she gets dressed. As pointed out in the comments, they call her "Harpy", not "Siren".
• Isabelle of Ménage à 3 is, admittedly, a total beginner who acknowledges that she has a lot to learn — but that doesn't stop her from inveigling her way into a jam session with competent musicians Sonya and Yuki. The result is torture for them.
• Millie of Ozy and Millie sometimes tries to write songs, which range from completely unstructured, to trying to exhaust every possible rhyme for a word (and inventing new ones).
• Thorn in Leif & Thorn convinces Leif that he can't sing by providing a demonstration that cracks glass and makes flowers wilt.
• Rever, a traveling singer in Champions of Far'aus sings so badly that when he finished a performance at an inn, besides being the target of Produce Pelting, one of the insults he got from one of the patrons was "Pope carried the act!". For context, Pope is a penguin in a bow tie that was "singing" beside Rever on stage.
• One Full Frontal Nerdity arc had the characters playing "Stephen King, The RPG" where they fought an evil radio. To defeat it, they had to sing "a dreadful song": Achey Breaky Heart. Because they were playing a horror game, Lewis and Nelson actually had to sing, at which point Shawn declared that he'd have rather let the radio kill him.
• Merlow of Court of Roses is usually a very skilled bagpiper, but when Merlow is drunk he is...not very good.
• 1977:The Comic, described as creators of the sixth worst album of The '70s.
• In AsteroidQuest, the Salikai have some... specific tastes in music.
  Father Zozu: Unfortunately, our tastes do not overlap kindly, as what we enjoy most would be called experimental by most aliens, or perhaps not even music at all by the closed-minded.
• Herb from the The Bare Pit provokes concern whenever he breaks out the accordion. It's not so much his playing that's bad but rather the fact that something unfortunate always happens when he does. First time, it caused a woman to go into labor. 2nd time, it caused a boat to crash on an island (though that was just in a screenplay). The 3rd time it happened a whole party's decor got ruined, after which the accordion went into "forced retirment."

Web Videos

• While Lindsay can play the piano very well, The Nostalgia Chick is horrible at it. Todd in the Shadows was hurt enough by her playing that he gives in and does the crossover review she wanted to do with him.
• The premise of Jayuzumi's video "Bad Violin Trolling" is subjecting a lobby of people in Call of Duty: Ghosts to sound clips of dreadful violin music. The reactions range from surprisingly calm to hammy and stupid.
• Both MJTR and Thayne have played themselves up as horrendous singers in Analog Control. This is particularly played up when the two reenact an atrocious song being sung by a user in Habbo Hotel, which they refer to as "i lvoe u".
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
  • The Healthy Band from the fifth, in stark contrast to the previous teachers. Bread Guy mutters all his lines, Spinach Can sounds mentally handicapped, Steak Guy consistently mispronounces "organs" and doesn't even try to find a word that rhymes with "grey", and several lines of their song are just "doo doo doo doo doo". Also, the song sounds improvised - badly - resulting in repetitive delivery of increasingly nonsensical and contradictory advice.
  • The Lamp in the sixth sounds drunk, has an even more grating singing voice than the Healthy Band, and one of the only two couples in what we hear of her song that even sort of rhymes is rhyming "your friends" with "your friends".
  • Also in the sixth, the music in the bar is provided by a Guy stiffly mashing the keys of a piano, though it's unclear if this is considered good music in their world.
  • We only hear snippets of their songs, but each of the one-shot teachers' songs (if you can even call them that) sounds more repetitive and less coherent than the last, their singing ability ranges wildly from vaguely tonal to making the Lamp sound like Freddie Mercury by comparison, and one of them claims that "planets live inside the Moon".

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: Sheen has a singing voice so bad that it puts to sleep some creatures that are actually angered when they hear any other music. In another episode, his lack of singing ability is mocked by other characters. In song. He becomes angry.
• The Adventures of Puss in Boots features the Goblin Cleevil and her Gob Flute: a loud, cacophonous instrument played with the nose. Given the way she talks about it, goblin music is supposed to be cacophony. She is forbidden from playing it within the city limits.
• Adventure Time: In the episode "The Gut Grinder," Finn plays Jake's viola appallingly on two separate occasions.
• The Animals of Farthing Wood: Weasel. "Beautiful Dreamer" is a favourite.
• Eddie Storkowitz in an episode of Birdz. He masks it at first by lip-synching to stage-fright-ridden Gregory's much better voice during rehearsal, then come the day of the show, he fakes a sore throat and ropes Gregory into being his understudy.
• Arthur: Francine is talented at playing the drums and singing, but she sounds terrible when she tries to do both at the same time. When she does, it sounds like her singing and her drum playing are trying to outnoise each other.
• Macie Lightfoot (one of Ginger Foutley's two BFFs from As Told by Ginger) claims that Miranda Killgallen (the Beta Bitch to Courtney Gripling) is the one person they know who can make the clarinet sound bitter.
• In The Beatles episode "I'll Be Back," three would-be musicians try to upstage the boys' appearance in a Texas town. They and their music (a 45 rpm recording of "Ticket To Ride" as if the adapter was missing and the hole rolling against the spindle) are pelted with rotten vegetables.
• Danger Mouse:
  • DM himself has cotton in his ears while Penfold practices the saxophone in "Who Stole The Bagpipes?". In another episode when a Welsh Witches' Broom refers to Penfold's "Land of Our Fathers" bringing a tear to its eye, he agrees that Penfold's singing brings tears to his eyes.
  • In "Play It Again, Wufgang," Penfold's singing makes the episode's villain Wufgang Bach comment that he should be on Wufgang's side. He meant that as a compliment.
• Tucker Foley in Danny Phantom. He has a terrible voice for singing, and once used it to get some teens out of another musician's trance.
• Daria:
  • Everyone in Mystik Spiral. Though if you exclude the silly lyrics, "Freakin' Friends" is actually rather competent.
  • Jane has also proven to be as talented as her brother in the singing department. When she first meets Tom Sloane, she proceeds to purposefully torture him with a horrible rendition of "Old McDonald Had a Farm".
• The Davincibles: the Tenors, Aka and Pella, who are both recurring villains.
• An episode of Earthworm Jim exaggerated this with a pair so bad that their music could, quite literally, destroy the universe if they were only a little louder.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: In the episode "Pain in the Ed," Ed's mom forces him to take violin lessons, and even for a beginner, he's dreadful—whenever Ed plays his violin, he produces a bark-peeling, stone-splitting cacophony enjoyed only by Cloudcuckoolander Jonny 2x4. It's so bad that even the music notes come flying out and smack Eddy in the face. Compared to most examples, Ed's actually fully aware of just how bad he is at playing the violin—in fact, the only reason he keeps practicing is because his mom forces him to play the instrument.
  Edd: Why Ed, I didn't know you played an instrument.
  Ed: In my mom's dreams, I can!
• Exaggerated in The Fairly OddParents! episode "One Man Banned", where Timmy can't even play one note on a triangle without causing natural disasters, biblical plagues, or other catastrophes to occur.
• Foofur: Fencer the cat's singing is cringeworthy.
• Futurama:
  • The Robot Devil challenges Fry and Leela to a fiddle contest with a golden fiddle (which even Fry points out is impractical). Fry asks Leela if she can play the fiddle—she says no, but she used to play drums, and it's pretty much the same. She then proceeds to play appallingly. Then she uses it to beat the crap out of the Robot Devil so they can escape.
  • Zapp Brannigan sings so badly that the glass covering the escape pod button shatters before the hand reaches it. He empties an entire restaurant this way in "Amazon Women in the Mood".
  • Fry on the holophoner, a clarinet-like instrument that also displays holograms whose quality and content correlate directly to the music. It's incredibly hard — like learning a 3D-modeling software as if it were an instrument. Fry can only play the holophoner well by trading his hands with those of a robot.
  • Zig-zagged by Leela regarding her singing voice. In "Spanish Fry", her singing is so bad that Lrrr and Ndnd think she's launching an attack, but her singing voice is decent in episodes like "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" and "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back".
• God Rocks!: In "Kitney vs. Mini-Bot", Kitney demonstrates such bad singing skills that she causes Splinter to faint.
• Harvey Street Kids: Audrey can play the guitar, but is a terrible harmonica player. Likewise, Lotta isn't very good at playing the piano.
• Hoppity Hooper: Fillmore really does not know how to play that bugle.
• Huckleberry Hound. His rendition of "My Darling Clementine," is lampshaded in a Laff-A-Lympics comic book story where the Great Fondoo makes duplicates of him during a ski relay race. Quick Draw McGraw (whose singing is just as cringe-worthy) makes the duplicates all sing "My Darling Clementine"; the one most off-key was the real Huck.
• Inspector Gadget:
  • Weaponized by MAD Yodeler, whose yodeling is so dreadful that it can trigger avalanches.
  • Gadget himself is shown to be one in "A Star is Lost"; despite his fondness for cello and harp music, he cannot play those instruments very well.
• Kaeloo:
  • Stumpy. In one episode, he tries to raise money by playing music. He turns out to be really bad, so he decides to threaten to keep playing unless he is paid. Kaeloo reluctantly coughs up some money.
  • Kaeloo herself is horrible at music. In one episode, she tries singing while playing the harp, and Stumpy tells her to stop because both her music and her singing are awful.
• Ninki in the BBC kids' show Kerwhizz is an enthusiastic singer with a truly horrible singing voice.
  Kaboodle: Oh no! Get a doctor! Ninki's ill!
  Kit: [laughing] She's not ill, Boodle, she's singing!
• Kim Possible:
  • The titular protagonist actually has a beautiful singing voice...but she has trouble when it comes to high notes, which she uses when she's trapped underneath a sheet of ice. Apparently though, she improves enough in time to sing for the talent show.
  • Señor Senior Jr. wants nothing more than to be an international pop sensation, but his only opportunity comes when he is given a chance to sing in jail for the entertainment of other members of Kim's Rogues Gallery—too bad his singing voice is more evil than anything even Shego can dish out.
• Non-human example in League of Super Evil where in iDestruct, Doktor Frogg uses an Opera Blaster, which plays extremely off-key opera notes to scare off the line, only for Doomageddon to destroy the machine.
• Zig-zagged by Spencer on The Lionhearts. He's a very good guitarist, but he's got a terrible singing voice.
• Hen in the Little Bear episode "Diva Hen". Possibly a reference to Florence Foster Jenkins, including an excerpt from one of Jenkins' favorites ("Der Hölle Rache").
• Looney Tunes:
  • In The Three Little Bops, the Big Bad Wolf only wants to join the pigs' jazz group, but he blows a squawking toneless horn.
  • In The Mouse That Jack Built, the mouse version of Jack Benny plays a violin that makes the hungry cat wear earmuffs while he's waiting to snatch him.
  • In "From Hare to Heir", Bugs does a horrendous rendition of "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (on purpose, just to test Sam’s temper).
• The Looney Tunes Show episode "The Grand Old Duck of York" has Daffy attempt to learn piano, but his playing is abysmal and Bugs has to buy noise-cancelling earplugs as a result. And while practicing at Granny's house, his playing is so bad that Tweety would actually go inside Sylvester's mouth to avoid hearing any of it.
• Coop of Megas XLR harnessed his horrible singing voice for good by literally weaponizing it with "The Jammer", a robot-mounted karaoke system that amplifies his songs to the point where they can destroy an entire space station. It's so dangerous and cruel to use there is more safety features around activating it than his nukes.
• Molly of Denali: In "Fiddlesticks," Molly is terrible at playing the fiddle, and it's so bad, that it scares her dog Suki.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Pinkie zigzags this trope. In some episodes, her singing weirds out everyone else, in other episodes it's so good she can start a Crowd Song and in still other episodes, it enrages them into a starting a war. There is only one thing for certain; keep her away from the flugelhorns.
• The Octonauts: Captain Barnacles's inability to carry a tune on the accordion is what sets off the plot of "The Orcas", as the noise attracts a pod of orcas to the Octopod.
• Pinky and the Brain: Yoko Ono expy Yoyo Nono in "All You Need Is Narf". She has one (mercifully very short) song, in an unmusical voice and with discordant intervals.
• Dr. Doofenshmirtz of Phineas and Ferb is a decent guitar player, but has a voice that can peel paint. One of his evil schemes was using a voice modulator to make it seem like he was singing in a smooth country accent (and thus be able to brainwash the audience into obeying his commands), but this failed when Perry destroyed the modulator and the crowd turned against him.
• Ready Jet Go!: In "Mindy's Mystery", Mindy's flugelhorn playing isn't very good when she's sleepy.
• In Ruby Gloom, Ruby, Iris, Misery audition as vocalist for Frank & Len's band and all three of them sound horrible. Averted in that when Misery sings in her sleep, she's a fantastic singer, the only problem being how to make sure she's asleep when she needs to perform.
• Carver's older sister Penny in The Weekenders. While listening to Penny's singing lesson, Lor compares her voice to "an ostrich gargling with oatmeal."
• Samurai Jack: the Scotsman's bagpipe playing is horrendous, enough to drive the otherwise stoic Jack to his knees in pain. This is weaponized when they face off against some sirens and the Scotsman's music is loud enough and bad enough to break Jack's brainwashing.
• The Simpsons: Leavelle, the bodyguard trainer from "Mayored to the Mob," sings an absolutely horrible rendition of "I Will Always Love You" after passing his students. All of them immediately book it.
• The Smurfs (1981): Harmony Smurf, as specified in Comic Books. This becomes crucial in one story where he saves the day.
• South Park
  • Cartman's rendition of O Holy Night is nightmare-inducing. His version of Come Sail Away, however, is a different story.
  • In "Worldwide Recorder Concert", the kids' recorder playing sounds jumbled and clumsy in act one. And that's before they all sound the dreaded Brown Note that causes the entire human race to spontaneously void their bowels.
  • In "The New Terrance and Phillip Trailer", there is a scene in Russell Crowe: Fightin' Around The World where Crowe's singing is so God-awful that his boat partner Tugger attempts does whatever he could to not listen until has enough and shoots himself.
• Spongebob Squarepants
  • Squidward's a terrible clarinet player, but still persists on practicing loudly. He seems somewhat aware of this, and it is a running gag on the series. In "Band Geeks", he got a visit from Animal Control after a practice session, who mistakenly thought he had a dying animal on the premises. And somehow he still thinks he's a talented musician. Funnily enough, later in the episode when he plays a few notes, he's actually not that bad. In one episode his musical talent is so bad that he's forced to attend music class on a court order.
  • In "Naughty Nautical Neighbors", SpongeBob is revealed to be absolutely terrible in playing the double bass, so much so he doesn't even know what it's called (he refers to it as a "bassinet," which in actuality is a wicker baby cradle). The one time he tries to play a song it sounds more like metal scraping on metal than anything resembling music, and he bows the strings with such excessive force that he launches the bow into one of Squidward's paintings. After doing so, he then attempts to strum it like a guitar, mercifully only for a few seconds before being interrupted.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil:
  • Star's crush Oskar Greason can drive people to agony with his terrible keytar playing, but Star seems to like his music. Oddly enough, he seems to get better as the series progresses.
  • As seen in "Brittney's Party", Brittney Wong is shown to be a terrible singer when she tries to entertain the guests at her birthday party with karaoke.
  • According to Star and Marco's Guide to Mastering Every Dimension, Pony Head's sisters Shinda and Shonda are musicians, but they're not very good at it. They put on some of their music in "Ponymonium", and it basically consists of them flatly reciting lyrics over a generic pop beat.
• Thomas & Friends: Thomas plays with this trope. In Too Loud, Thomas, his opera singing is so bad that it makes a little girl's balloon pop, birds fly away, a cow run away and a shed collapses. He's a great singer, but atrocious at singing opera.
• Toad Patrol has Elf Cup, though luckily she was just beginning and manages to improve greatly by season 2.
• Total Drama
  • Chris McLean's a terrible singer, which is probably why his being in a boy band is an off-limits topic of discussion.
  • In Action, Lindsay is revealed to be a terrible singer (and might be tone deaf).
  • Sugar, to the extent that she actually was eliminated due to this.
• Ultimate Spider-Man has Spidey express a belief he's a good amateur flute player—a belief constantly undermined by his actual playing, which is so off-key, it caused everyone to cringe.
• Contrary to most mermaids, Tsuni from Wishfart is a horrible singer - so bad in fact that whenever she sings, it awakens the Kraken in a very foul mood.
• In World of Winx, Ace (the host of WOW!) had fired Bloom for embarrasing him on TV and replaced her with a girl named Lorelei. But unforunately, she turns out to be a terrible singer.
• The X-Men: The Animated Series episode, "Have Yourself a Morlock Little X-Mas", shows that for all the talents Cyclops has, singing isn't one of them and unlike some of the other examples, Scott even freely admits he can't sing.
• Bert in The Raccoons is a terrible trumpet player, but everyone is too polite to tell him.
• In the animated short Tone Deaf, a little princess's screechy singing is so horribly off-key that it causes a unicorn to throw up rainbows, a horde of small woodland animals to spontaneously collapse and die, the video itself to nosedive into Deranged Animation when her voice is amplified by loudspeakers, and a rainbow to smash into a million pieces as though it were made of glass. At the end of the video, the unicorn resorts to stuffing dead birds in his ears so the princess can ride on his back without her terrible singing bothering him, allowing her to sing to her heart's content.
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: Xavier at first in "I Am Johann Sebastian Bach", as he plays "Hot Cross Buns" on the recorder off-key.

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