51–55 of 55 posts
Pff. Playing drums like Buddy Rich or showing off while the band tunes their instruments - not really a tough choice (might have been really useful back then but today it seems kind of parlor trickery).
I'm much more interested in (perfect) relative pitch. Thankfully one can get better at that skill.
I think perfect pitch can be acquired as an adult, I just think it becomes exponentially harder. I started to learn guitar around 12 years old, and became interested in perfect pitch after reading Steve Vai internalised A=440Hz by having a tape start to play the tone as he slept. I definitely don't have full perfect pitch, but after a while I could: - Tune a guitar, no matter how out of tune to concert pitch without…
I've had the ability to name the key of a song by ear for a few years...probably since my freshman year of undergrad. At that point I had been playing guitar for about 7 years, and had somehow internalized key signature.
For me, it feels very calculated, although I didn't begin doing it intentionally. I essentially compare a new song against an internal database of known songs. For instance, my reference song in B minor is "Comfortably Numb". If I hear a new song that sounds like it's in the same key, it must also be B minor. After I built up an internal collection for each key and practiced enough, it went from being a mechanical process to an intuitive one. It's not perfect, though; most of the "boring" keys sound similar. That is, I have a lot of trouble distinguishing between C, G, and F - fewer accidentals means less "color". In addition, keys within a fifth of each other can sound really similar since they're only one accidental apart. I'll often misidentify something in Bb minor as being in F minor, or something in E as being in B. Surprisingly though, half-step differences end up sounding very different. My wife and I watched Pitch Perfect recently, and during a scene where two women were singing "Titanium", the fact that they were singing it in B minor rather than C minor was extremely apparent.
There's a strange preoccupation with perfect pitch. It's not very useful today since there are inexpensive electronic and mechanical tools to give you absolute pitch. It wasn't even that useful previously. I believe that people confuse it with relative pitch which usually translates to the skill of transcribing and memorizing melodies. This is very useful as a musician or even in daily life sometimes. There are peopl…
You refer to perfect pitch and absolute pitch like they're different things -- do you realize that they're the same thing? My brother and I are both musicians with perfect pitch, and we've found it useful in a variety of circumstances. To name a couple, it really helps if you're jamming and want to pick up a progression quickly, or if you're DJing and want to key match. I will concede that Traktor recently got key de…
Are you referring to someone else's comment? I use them interchangeably in the first paragraph
There's a strange preoccupation with perfect pitch. It's not very useful today since there are inexpensive electronic and mechanical tools to give you absolute pitch. It wasn't even that useful previously. I believe that people confuse it with relative pitch which usually translates to the skill of transcribing and memorizing melodies. This is very useful as a musician or even in daily life sometimes. There are peopl…
Do you have perfect pitch? How can you assess the utility if you don't possess it? Perfect pitch would be very useful IMO, can you imagine what it would do to one's compositional abilities for example? Relative pitch is just recognition of intervals between notes and the qualities of different chords, but you're right in that perfect pitch and relative pitch are quite unrelated.
There's a strange preoccupation with perfect pitch. It's not very useful today since there are inexpensive electronic and mechanical tools to give you absolute pitch. It wasn't even that useful previously. I believe that people confuse it with relative pitch which usually translates to the skill of transcribing and memorizing melodies. This is very useful as a musician or even in daily life sometimes. There are peopl…
There's a strange preoccupation with being able to fly through willpower. It's not very useful today since there are (relatively) inexpensive devices that let you fly anywhere in the world. Perfect pitch is a real-life superpower for musicians. I'll grant, like another commenter said, that if I had child-like neuroplasticity, attaining perfect pitch would just be icing on the cake.