Subject: Re: Hearing notes, chords and tuning by ear?
Author: MartinGibsonTaylorDate: 5 Jul
Ref:
Some people are born with "perfect pitch" and can naturally hear the
difference between a F# and G the way you and I see the difference
between pink and red. I have met two people in my life with this gift
and both were more than happy to let me test them. They were both
musicians (one a vocalist the other a guitarist) and they could both
improvise anything. But this gift is something you have to be born
with, Google "perfect pitch" and you'll find there have been many
University studies to see if it can be taught and it simply can't
(well, actually in children below the age of 3 it can be taught, but I
assume you're older than that :)
However, you can learn relative pitch and it's been proven adults can
learn to memorize a handful of notes and be able to recite them from
memory (however you have to work to retain it). With about 2 months of
daily ear training I was able to train my ears to recognize E2 (low E
string on a guitar) along with a handful of other notes, knowing E2 I
can tune a guitar without a tuner. After being able to reconize a
handful of notes (E2, C4, A4, C5, Bb4) I have found it hard to be able
to memorize additional notes.
There are rumors that Steve Vai taught himself to recognize every note
on the guitar (note: this is still not perfect pitch) by spending
hours a day practicing octave jumps with every fretted note. It would
be interesting to test Mr. Vai on a piano or bass guitar and see how
well his pitch register is working, the people with the natural gift,
have the ability to strip away the tone character and register the
frequency of the note so if an airplane flew by and registered a
perfecr A5 (880.0mhz) if they were a trained musician with perfect
pitch they could tell you that's a A5.
Mark Bedingfie…
Hotfoot
