well, you're kind of onto something. i go by piano tuning (which is what guitars and all 'rock instruments' use). but horns are tuned differently, so their notes are different than guitars. if i remember right, saxophone is tuned a whole step below guitar, so when i'd yell out an A to my sax playing friend, he would play what sounded like a piano G but was an A to him. i don't understand why all instruments don't go by the same pitch scale, but maybe a music theory buff can pitch in here.

it's annoying when a guitarist, like you said, tunes down to Eb and calls his open E chords Es, when he's technically producing an Eb. i guess, like the sax player, he's technically correct, but i only care about pitch. the notes.. whatever, they're arbitrary labels. as long as i can establish with other musicians what tone will be called what (and it's been awhile since i've played with horn players so whatever) i'm happy.

Yes, that's what's throwing me. It's all relative, unless you have a standard like A 440. So what's the difference between someone with relative pitch and someone with absolute pitch?

One definition of absolute pitch I found--someone who can name any note played on any instrument. But in the case of a piano or guitar, does it matter if it's tuned to 440 or not?

relative pitch means you have a clear understanding of intervals. anyone can develop this (and should, it comes in handy). if you play someone an E and tell them to sing you a fifth, they can sing you the B. or the other way around; you play a root and a minor 6th and they can tell you what the interval is.

i guess the difference between relative and perfect pitch is that with relative, you need some sort of reference point. with perfect pitch, you should be able to sing (within a few hz) or recognize any note with no reference.

someone with some indian music theory knowledge should pitch in because they have notes between our (western) notes. that should clarify things..

i think that is beyond human. i mentioned this earlier in the thread, but pitch can drift. an A at 438 or whatever is just as much of an A as 440 to me. i'm not sure where each note's cut-off is, but notes can be a little off yet still be identifiable.

with perfect pitch, you should be able to sing (within a few hz) or recognize any note with no reference.

OK, if A is at 440, G will be 392, and B will be 494. So if someone with perfect pitch can't necessarily detect whether A is precisely 440 or not, they would at least have to detect when the pitch is off by 50Hz, right? Or is there something about an A note on a piano that's distinctive, even if the string is tuned down 392 say? Or would a piano sound really weird tuned that far off? What about guitar?

To put it another way: someone with perfect pitch is asked to sing an "A" note. When is an A note not an A note? As long as it's closer to A than to A# or G# (at A 440 tuning)?

yeah. i really don't know how to measure it, but i can tell when it's close. if it's really close i probably don't really think about it*. if it's more flat, it may seem a little weird but it's still identifiable as the same note. if it's exactly between the half-steps (and i'm not sure that's ever the case), i dunno. like i said, perfect pitch can drift so i'd probably just detect it to whichever side my pitch was leaning.

in the modern, digital tuner world, it's not really an issue. nearly every commercial jingle/overheard radio song/ringtone/whatever is tuned perfectly to 440, so even if you're listening to 78's on some screwy old player all morning, the first commercial that comes up 're-calibrates' your ear and notes are easily identifiable again. if you hear 50 songs on the radio that all share the same pitch, then you hear an old fucked up Stones master or whatever, it's pretty obvious that the Stones master is the slightly flat/sharp one.


*i made a recording once with guitar and a fucked up old synth. i recorded the synth part first then overdubbed the guitar. once i started recording the guitar, tuned with your average korg tuner, i realized it and the synth were off. the synth (and i didn't know this at the time but i guess this happens) was tuned to 438. oops. i now make sure the keyboard is in 440. the point is, the synth notes sounded close enough not to throw me off immediately.

I had a friend in college, Andy, who had perfect pitch. I would play any note on the guitar and he would name it - anything from low E to the high B on the 19th fret. He would listen to the radio - and write down the chords to songs by ear, which I would verify by playing them.

I have a pretty decent ear - but this guy was scary talented. You can train yourself to have relative pitch with practice.

Dr. Venkman wrote:I call bullshit on "perfect pitch". Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

Agreed. It's uncommon.

It's funny to me how many musicians claim to have it.

I think I'd go crazy trying to play music if I had it. Especially electric guitar.

I see Yngwie Malmsteen claims to have perfect pitch. Dude plays a guitar strung with 9s, with a scalloped neck. No wonder he's so irritable.

tmidgett wrote:I see Yngwie Malmsteen claims to have perfect pitch. Dude plays a guitar strung with 9s, with a scalloped neck. No wonder he's so irritable.

If this is indeed true, it incontrovertibly proves that having perfect pitch doesn't necessarily correlate with musicianship.

barndog wrote:

tmidgett wrote:I see Yngwie Malmsteen claims to have perfect pitch. Dude plays a guitar strung with 9s, with a scalloped neck. No wonder he's so irritable.

If this is indeed true, it incontrovertibly proves that having perfect pitch doesn't necessarily correlate with musicianship.

I don't agree. Didn't you see my earlier post?

DEBBIE GIBSON HAS PERFECT PITCH!

case closed.

tmidgett wrote:

Dr. Venkman wrote:I call bullshit on "perfect pitch". Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

Agreed. It's uncommon.

It's funny to me how many musicians claim to have it.

I think I learned a long time ago that true perfect pitch is something that's innate, and can't really be learned--hence its rareness. No idea if that's true.

Last year I went to the Communications Research Centre Canada in Ottawa to interview some of the people there who do rigorous subjective listening tests to determine the quality of audio codecs. The tests involve listening to a passage of music (sometimes film dialog) coded at 16-bit/44.1 khz, and then listening to two versions of the same passage--one an exact copy of the first, and the other compressed using a codec unknown to the listener. The listener has to guess which passage is the compressed version, and then rate that passage on a scale based on how "annoying" it is to listen to. (That's really the word they use.)

Many of the people picked to take the tests are musicians or audio pros, the idea being that these people are likely to have the most discerning ears. But the testers never, under any circumstances, tell the listener how well he/she did, because very often people who think they have ears of gold really have ears of tin. The testers have learned from experience that when people find out they scored "badly," it can have a really debilitating effect on their confidence and self-esteem as musicians or audio pros.

It cuts both ways. One day the high-school-aged daughter of a CRC secretary visited the lab, and on a whim they gave her a test. She wasn't a musician, or even particularly into music, but she got one of the highest scores of anyone they'd ever tested.