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Perfect Pitch

  • 13-04-2004 9:12pm
    #1
    Raptor
    Closed Accounts Posts: 110 ✭✭


    Howdy all. Perfect pitch, myth/reality for some born with said ability/ability that can be learned?

    I've always assumed this was one of those things like singing/painting/understanding women etc that cannot be learned, and only a lucky few posses. However having wandered the internet for a bit, there's a huge array of sites, books, cds etc that claim this can be learned (in particular www.perfectpitch.com, which i also read about in some guitar magazine ages ago).

    My question is has anyone hear learned perfect pitch. The idea of knowing any note just from one listen seems pretty damn sweet for guitarists.


Comments

  • #2
    daram
    Closed Accounts Posts: 631 ✭✭✭daram


    Im getting there. But not quite. I can get it within a semi-tone at least.

    And I used to not be able to do it at all, so I suppose yes you can learn. My old jazz piano teacher taught himself too. He was scary. If you said the name of a note, he'd sing it, and be right, perfect tune a440.

    The only use I can see for the guitar is being able to tune straight to E if its out. And maybe for trying to pick out notes in simple songs.


  • #3
    musician.ie
    Closed Accounts Posts: 230 ✭✭musician.ie


    One technique is to learn relative pitch first - i.e. given any two notes, you learn to identify the interval between them. That's easy enough to do.

    Once you have this, a trick often used is to identify a number of songs you know well and figure out what note they start with. If you can identify this, then practice humming the first note of the song just before you play the song ( after not hearing it for a number of hours/days ). Eventually you'll be able to do it with 100% accuracy. You now have the pitch of one note "memorized" and can use that as your reference. This combined with relative pitching will allow you to reproduce a note on demand.


  • #4
    WetDaddy
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,399 ✭✭✭WetDaddy


    From what I've heard, those born with Perfect Pitch consider it to be a terrible curse at times.

    If listening to musicians playing slightly off concert pitch (but in tune with each other), then it can be unbearable for those with Perfect Pitch!

    As far as I know, teaching yourself won't cause any trouble like that though :)


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