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Hi everyone
Lately I've gotten the impression that I have some sort of perfect pitch that is very very imperfect. From practicing so much it feels like my working memory can remember the sound of a guitar note or string and then I can adjust to the exact pitch. It has worked with db,eb,c,a,e so far will need to try it a little bit more. I always sing a wee bit on the flat side though. Anyone care to share some thoughts and experiences?
I can't really identify pitches directly as such maybe guitar notes.
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03-04-2017 07:45 AM
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I think it's a matter of practice and training. After years of teaching guitar students with most of the lessons beginning with tuning by ear I can hear pretty good if a string is sharp, flat or to pitch. On a good day I'd be able to restring a guitar and then tune it to pitch without using a tuner.
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It's a common thing - developing a limited form of absolute pitch based around the open strings of a stringed instrument. It's a known phenomenon...
In a related vein - has anyone on the forum learned perfect pitch using one of those courses such as the Bruce arnold one?
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Perfect pitch has several grades of shade and is one of the skills that require both nature and nurture (plenty of each) while its utility is controversial. Most people think there are no disadvantages imposed by it though some people think perfect pitched persons have a difficult time integrating into musical situations that are not "in tune" and feel irritated easily. The perfect place for a perfect pitched musician is a classical music setting or a jazz orchestra. Wednesday night, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra was in Chicago Symphony Hall. He introduced Chris Crenshaw (34) as a composer and trumpet player with perfect pitch and they played some of his compositions.
This is one of Chris Crenshaw's compositions:
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Probably via excessive playing and learning songs by ear, I developed over time something I like to call "imperfect pitch".
Translated, I hear many things at pitch, often but not always. I am also capable of getting something wrong or just not
being sure. Sometimes, my initial perception is off by a half step but a later chord or note will clarify and realign my previous assumption. I generally write out chord chart transcriptions without an instrument in hand.
My skill developed with triadic and 7th chord music first because that was the music that I was dealing with.
As I logged time practicing more extended and altered voicings, those sounds also entered my aural vocabulary.
Memory, density and rapidly shifting terrain are all factors that can be more challenging.
I guess I hear best material closer to what I have played.
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I play harmonica as my first instrument. No tuning for me when I show up to a gig. I also play and build a variety of stringed instruments. More than once I have strung up , intonated then tuned newly built mandolins or guitars and then checked later with a tuner to find I had them tuned correctly or very close. It can be handy when doing a setup. I just guess at the pitch rather than fussing around with a tuner. I prefer using a tuning fork when tuning around the shop. Being around a variety of musical instruments helps us hear pitch rather than tone maybe?
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What's the definition of perfect pitch?
Chucking a banjo into a skip and getting it in first time
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Btw I had a girlfriend with pitch. She got very annoyed at my stupid questions about pitch.
Anyway the preferred term is apparently absolute pitch and it describes a spectrum of awareness:
Absolute pitch - Wikipedia
Anyway I know quite a few players with pitch. It seems to be more prevalent in the classical world.
According to Bruce Arnold, it's more useful in classical music.
Note that the wiki article states that there are no reported cases of someone learning perfect pitch, which rather raises the question of the effectiveness of the perfect pitch products sold on Arnold's site. I have met a researcher in the area who assured me that if pitch isn't in early childhood it cannot be developed.
OTOH she also claimed all Russian professional musicians have pitch due to their education system, and that Hungarians do not for the same reason. I think this may be an exaggeration.
Personally the Hungarian level of relative pitch musicianship would do me fine. Hungarian musicians are pretty scary good at this stuff (Kodaly)
BUT - I do rate highly Bruce Arnold's relative pitch training products and approach, so.... maybe?Last edited by christianm77; 03-04-2017 at 10:24 AM.
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Steve Martin will come after you :-)
Originally Posted by christianm77
Last edited by medblues; 03-04-2017 at 11:50 AM.
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Yes, I have this-- I can sing an A on command, for example. I also come up a bit flat on the other "open string notes." Originally Posted by christianm77
More and more, I think developing good relative pitch is the key. Perfect pitch sounds like a bit of a curse. Especially if you ever listen to old Stones records.
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lol! Originally Posted by mr. Beaumont
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just nailed an a flat - wuhuuu
found this little test, that isn't very helpful at all. Everything becomes relative after you've heard a pitch
Perfect Pitch Ear Training Test
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Some people think Lenny Tristano had Perfect Timing.
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I have a simple cheat trick to know a note or key when I hear it.
I sing the deepest note I can sing. That's usually a D or Db and I can use it as a reference point.
I can have a deeper voice sometimes, but I will notice.
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Yeah, I had a girlfriend who was an absolute bitch, too, constantly annoyed at me little habits and (...finds me reading glasses...), oh, oh, it's Pitch. Originally Posted by christianm77
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Like the Rick Beato vid's with his son, Dylan:
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I've been doing ear training a lot. When I still remember the last notes I've played, I can pretty much predict the sound of the next chord under my fingers. Not perfect enough to be usable yet. But one time something strange happened. I just had started the app and it played the 1st chord for me, and I looked at the fretboard and the shape of my own chord and KNEW the sound of it and that it was gonna sound exactly right.. Oh boy what an incredibly feeling when it turned out exactly that
Hasn't happened again though. Maybe it was just a random thing. Gaaaah..
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It's said that some players in the Basie band had perfect pitch and when they were on the road would play a game to identify, for example, the pitch of a train whistle going by. Benny Carter was known to have it. I most definitely don't but over the years have developed more of a sense of pitch valence. What I mean, is how close a note is to the absolute. That said, I would say that in some sense if I did have perfect pitch, it would probably drive me nuts being the obsessive that I am. Before today, when tuners are the norm, probably most popular music was slightly awry because tuning the piano was not always an option. I think the important consideration we face is relative pitch. It's how we find common ground when playing together.
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I wouldn't doubt most of the players here have "advanced relative pitch", but it's not perfect pitch.
i went to music school with a guy who had real PP. Everytime the guy walked by I would play a note, and immediately he would say the note, never got it wrong. No hesitation or thinking, it was just there, like a sixth sense.
Oddly, he wasn't a practice 24/7 kinda guy, it was just something he seemed to be born with.
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Jack Grassel wrote about perfect pitch. I found it interesting.
Free Lessons and Sage Advice - Jack Grassel
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I´m still working on my relative pitch, but sometimes I hear a note in my head - go to the piano and without thinking of note names my Jedi finger can feel the right key. My hit ratio detecting drop D tuning is pretty good too.
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There are over two dozen temperaments that have been used in the history of music, only a few still well known, with equal temperament the modern favorite (a recent standard, as is the A=440Hz which historically varied the better part of an octave).
So, the naming of a note from a given pitch must be within the context of a concert pitch standard and a temperament. Both those necessities make the very definition of perfect pitch difficult. Which temperament would be real perfect pitch? Today, we would test with equal temperament, but what about back before that was invented?
In equal temperament the chromatic pitches are 100 cents apart, meaning that each chromatic pitch has a +/-50 cent pitch range error not accounted when the pitch is named correctly but heard up to that same error, which is the size of a semitone interval.
The closer you examine the assumptions of perfect pitch, the more improbable that anyone has really figured out a way to define and test for it, which is not to say no such possible thing exists.
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I suspect what Absolute Pitch or "Perfect" Pitch really involves is a near-perfect memory of pitches and the ability to compare a pitch we're hearing with known pitches. So the naming of the pitches would be culturally conditioned, depending on how one's culture classified pitches. But the mental ability to take a heard pitch and compare it to a remembered pitch to which a label has been assigned seems to me to be, though quite remarkable, also completely believable.
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My pseudo perfect pitch, along with my pseudo speed, is just what I needed to play pseudo jazz.
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My grandmother had perfect hearing. She didn't play or sing anything ever. The only effect it had to her was that whenever she listened live bands on TV, she heard that the instruments and singers were always out of tune.
Also I know about a few people(some fellow students) who have that perfect pitch thing but didn't get too deep into musics. By itself, it seems to be not a musical ability at all.
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