“You can’t acquire perfect pitch it’s something you’re born with.”Ī slightly bizarre claim, since pitch standards are entirely arbitrary and have shifted many times over the decades and centuries. I have not the slightest notion of perfect pitch, but years of tuning bagpipes has given me (and all experienced pipers) very acute relative pitch. It amazes me that somebody can hear that one band is two cents sharp. Somebody who had recorded that contest went back and checked the pitch of the various bands all were at 453 but the band in question was playing at 455. There was one contest where a certain judge wrote “band tuned sharp” on one band’s scoresheet. Now, every solo competitor and every pipe band might be tuned to a slightly different pitch, but A=453 has sort of emerged as the standard pitch. I’m long involved in the Scottish Highland piping scene, and it’s interesting how many of the judges seem to have perfect pitch for the pitch of the pipes. But she could not tune any of the other strings to concert pitch by memory. She could tune the A string of her violin quite accurately to that note by ear, then tune the other strings to the A string. So the idea that somebody is born knowing what A=440 is is absurd.Ī sort of odd thing is that I used to know a violinist who had perfect pitch for just one note, A=440. It’s just memory: if you were born in a place where you never heard an A=440 you couldn’t have perfect pitch for it.” On the contrary, Hup, it’s been shown that anyone with normal hearing can learn perfect pitch.Ī jazz musician I know who has perfect pitch told me “the mystique about perfect pitch is silly. Then it is a handicap but messing with a keyboard or those interent resources seem to be the way to improve. So my conclusion is that it is not really a problem unless I am trying to transcribe a tune that is hard to play on a whistle or to work out the starting notes of a tune to learn by ear. If a tune ends by decending to a key note it can dip down to a leading note and come up again without me noticing, even though my fingers will go for the note when playing.īut pick at notes on a piano keyboard and it is no problem and I when playing flute or singing I have a strong tendency to match someone elses pitch and it is no big deal. I am also thrown by the sense of harmonic movement in a tune. My thinking is that I am thrown by the different harmonics in the notes (especially from vowel sounds when singing). It is not immediately obvious to me on the flute that some intervals (say fifths between various notes) are the same. If I whistle with my lips it is no problem hearing differences. If I am singing (with words) I often have difficulty knowing if a small interval is up or down (say when trying to transcribe a song tune before I forget it). Just get good at hearing relative pitch and you’ll do fine. This will give you good *relative* pitch-which means exactly what it says-being able to hear pitch relative to the other notes in the tune you’re playing.Īnd don’t worry about absolute pitch-it’s not something that helps much when it comes to playing this music. And then two frets higher (or lower), and then three, and so on. Use those frets to train yourself to hear the difference between one note and the note just one fret higher (or lower). What might be trickier is being able to hear the interval-for example, is the next note a *little* higher or a *lot* higher? You’re in luck-you play a fretted instrument. Unless you have some sort of auditory processing disorder, hearing whether a note is higher or lower than the note before it is easy, right? When you listen for pitch (say, to distinguish one note from the next so you can learn a tune by ear), all you really need to hear is (1) whether the “next” note is higher or lower in pitch, and (2) how *much* higher or lower it is (this is called the “interval”). Don’t waste your money on a course-plenty of free ways to improve your ear.īesides, the skills you need to play this music aren’t that difficult.
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