Excercises to help improve/develop relative pitch

[Guest Noel Edmonds]

please

[pcock]

you mean like being able to hear specific pitch and identify the note key?

 

be prepared to fail, some music guy estimated that only ten percent of humans actually have the ability to learn this but.

 

when you sit down at your gear, try and sing C before you even play a note. then play C, see how wrong you were, sing the C which you now know is correct.

 

repeat.

 

took me 4 months to work out C, 4 months for the rest of the notes to follow, and another few months to work out intervals, keys, certain named dissonances.

 

if you can learn C, you can do everyhting else for sure.

[Guest Rook]

this might sound silly, but dont think about it. Start with one note as a reference. And then just randomly do others but try to get them in like one second. The whole point is your trying to make it your instinct. When you see a color, you dont have to think about it, you just know what it is. Thinking too much will just slow you down.

 

I unfortunately was not blessed with perfect pitch, (very few are) but I do have very good relative pitch. If I dont have a reference, I usually think of A, D, or sometimes C. I can usually get one of those three, and just do intervals.

[Braintree]

If you play a stringed instrument, tune your instrument with using only one reference pitch [ie. A 440]. I have pretty good relative pitch and can usually nail a note on a piano on the first try when it's being sung to me.

[sisforawesome]

sounds like a lot of work that wouldn't really be worth it

[kcinsu]

felch: it sounds like you are talking about perfect pitch? I really don't buy that only 10% of people can learn relative pitch.

 

It's a VERY useful skill, and I regret not taking it more seriously when I had ear training classes in school... I plan on getting back into it... Im gonna get a computer program that lets me practice (the makers of sibelius make one, called auralia I think?)

 

Sure, it could be useful to be able to get as close to C as possible, just for general purposes... but really, Id just focus on relative pitch.

 

Also, most people I've known that have had perfect pitch, have been crappy musicians, and often get easily annoyed by slightly detuned sounds... or even non musical sounds that are pitched... it grates on them. From every encounter Ive had with people whove had perfect pitch, its made me realize Im actually glad I dont have it.

[kcinsu]

interesting. I wonder if it's from an online course?

[ten fingers ten toes]

My sister has perfect pitch.. she's a fine violinist but she has no interest in composing/writing music. She doesn't like dissonance though, that's for sure.

[kcinsu]

I didnt mean to say crappy musicians... I meant it in more of a creative term... I know plenty of killer performers with perfect pitch... but the creative side seemed to be missing (all just in my personal experience)

[ten fingers ten toes]

Oh, yah, I don't think she cares at all for creating music, not sure if that means she couldn't be very good at it or just doesn't want to, but who knows. It used to be fun to pass the time with her on road trips. She could tell you what note the sound of cars passing or bumps in the road or car horns were and stuff. Plus I stole all her New Order tapes and listened to them. Ah the 80s.

[Guest welcome to the machine]

I don't have perfect pitch, and likewise my experiences with people who have has been that they are good musicians but not neccasarily good writers. perhaps the part of the brain which is over developed (or however it works) in recognizing pitches gets in the way of creativity because they find the dissonance you NEED in music more uncomfortable than most? so there sensitivity to the raw feelings of notes and chords means the imperfect nature of our musical system puts them off wanting to create in it? interesting anyway.

 

I do know of one person who can name the notes easily, but is an awful musician, he just doesnt have the motor skills I guess.

 

I have pretty good relative pitch, and I can guess or identify notes fairly well if its a quiet room, but it takes me a second. I started off relating them to tunes I knew really well, I think the first ones were F - smells like teen spirit, Bb - the chicken and C - mustang sally :s from those I could generally work out other notes too, but i was often wrong as I certainly dont have perfect pitch.

 

that said i have never found this skill to be that useful, other than for guessing the note that forks make or joining in a jam without asking the key. pointless skills basically.

 

but the good inner ear, the ability to hear a tune in your head and then play it, and the ability to hear the notes whithin a chord and the type of chord it is is very valuable, and is all a part of relative pitch. If you play an instrument it is a vital part of eliminating the physical barrier between hearing a tune and playing it instantaneously without thinking. if you dont play it is a great to be able to listen to tunes and recognise whats going on, and to be able to hear complex harmonic ideas so that you are in a position to use them in your track.

 

I developed this by alot of playing, alot of studying theory (if you can name an interval or chord then its allot easier to remember its sound..) and most of all, transcribing solo's.

 

if you are really serious I cannot stress enough how useful this is, especially if you play. start off slow with some of the solo's of kind of blue (miles' would be best) and work up, it is the single greatest exercise for putting your inner ear through its paces, it can be very frustrating but also massively rewarding!

 

also, check out this, its a tune by Django bates called the interval song, if you sing along to the full version you will sing all the intervals whilst naming them over all the bass notes, awesome!

11_Interval_Song.mp3

[Guest Idiron]

i discovered about a year ago that i could hum/sing C but i didn't think much of it untill i read this thread! interesting as i also can't stand hearing people tune anything, it drives me fucking nuts. even though i don't play guitar i'm always doing it for people because i find it so grating/frustrating to hear people doing it. that said, i really like pitch-shifting in music.

[Guest butane bob]

You can't learn that shit, you've either got it, or you don't.

[Guest butane bob]

i discovered about a year ago that i could hum/sing C but i didn't think much of it untill i read this thread! interesting as i also can't stand hearing people tune anything, it drives me fucking nuts. even though i don't play guitar i'm always doing it for people because i find it so grating/frustrating to hear people doing it. that said, i really like pitch-shifting in music.

 

I got together with this bunch in school that were doing music for our graduation mass. There were two guys with guitars, and they were at least a half semitone out of tune with each other. I eventually asked him would he please tune his fucking guitar, or let me tune it for him. He refused, and then used the fifth fret trick. I ended up walking out.

 

AAAAAGH!

 

*kills things*

[Guest welcome to the machine]

You can't learn that shit, you've either got it, or you don't.

 

nah its PERFECT pitch that you cannot learn, although some say you can (im not sure if i agree). relative pitch is definately learnable, and it can give (to a degree) a note recognising ability, but its by no means as strong as that of someone with perfect pitch.

 

good relative pitch is often simplified into saying that the person 'has a good ear' but thats not the whole story, and having a good ear relates to other things as well.

 

I have always had a pretty good ear, but over the years of playing my relative pitch has gotten better, massively, to the point where i can really rely on it in a gig situation. so you can certainly learn it!

[Guest butane bob]

What I mean is, you can certainly improve on an ability that's already there. Same way as technique comes with regular practice.

 

If someone plays you a note, you should be able to find that note on your instrument and be 100% sure that that is the one. Practice and experience will help you to play that note without thinking, with the instrument as an extension of yourself, but if you can't even get the first part right, you may as well give up.

[Guest earlgrey]

You can't learn that shit, you've either got it, or you don't.

 

nah its PERFECT pitch that you cannot learn, although some say you can (im not sure if i agree).

I'm sure you can learn perfect pitch! (not that I have it myself though). I did an audio engineering course where part of the assessment was learning frequencies (not notes), so you could say "cut out some of the bass at ~60Hz" or "fuck me, that's a nasty ~12kHz". Students improved at this skill at differing rates, but everyone improved over time. I can do that somewhat still, but never learned perfect pitch - though I know a girl who does have it and I'm pretty sure she learned it through just practicing at the piano.

relative pitch is definately learnable, and it can give (to a degree) a note recognising ability, but its by no means as strong as that of someone with perfect pitch.

I can usually pick an IV or V given a tonic, but that's about it for me.

[Guest welcome to the machine]

You can't learn that shit, you've either got it, or you don't.

 

nah its PERFECT pitch that you cannot learn, although some say you can (im not sure if i agree).

I'm sure you can learn perfect pitch! (not that I have it myself though). I did an audio engineering course where part of the assessment was learning frequencies (not notes), so you could say "cut out some of the bass at ~60Hz" or "fuck me, that's a nasty ~12kHz". Students improved at this skill at differing rates, but everyone improved over time. I can do that somewhat still, but never learned perfect pitch - though I know a girl who does have it and I'm pretty sure she learned it through just practicing at the piano.

relative pitch is definately learnable, and it can give (to a degree) a note recognising ability, but its by no means as strong as that of someone with perfect pitch.

I can usually pick an IV or V given a tonic, but that's about it for me.

 

hmm, im not so sure. identifying frequencies that have been boosted or whatever in a sound is a bit easier than recognizing a note because you have the context of the sound around it. so you can easily find the ballpark area and refine using your ears experience.

 

but when you get to the lower end of the keyboard the accuracy you need is within 1 or 2 herts (and thats not even the lowest notes). ie the lowest A# and B on a keyboard have fundamentals of 27.5 and 29.1. now im sure you can learn to get in that area with frequency guessing, based on the way the notes feels. but to actually accurately get the difference between A# and B im not so sure about.

 

also, as im sure you know when playing notes that low you are really only hearing the upper harmonics as the fundamental is just too low, so being able to guess from the frequency 'spread' you get from that note would be very hard.

 

but secondly, and more importantly, perfect pitch isn't just being able to guess a note, its being able to mentally seperate them and to get different FEELINGS from them too. people with very pronounced perfect pitch hear the notes as clearly as we see different colors, and they can get it instantaneosly, even down as low as the notes i was describing.

 

also, allot of people with perfect pitch can instantly identify the notes in a chord and play it back to you (given a bit of training to know which notes are where of course) kind of like a photographic memory for sound.

 

also, people with this pure perfect pitch generally develop it in the first three years of there life, long before they start to understand an instrument. I would argue that this shows that its an over-developement in a certain area of the brain that is genetic more than learned.

 

I know you can learn to a certain degree, as I say, I have a bit so i can generally guess the note fairly quickly, but it is not failproof. my ability is easily put off by allot of loud noise, and if someone played a full m9b5b13 chord and said 'whats the b7 in that' i would find it really hard and would probably get it wrong!

 

I think what you are describing is relative pitch, working out from whats going on around it, or working out from a reference sound in your head, and by the very fact that its is a learned skill that develops over time, I don't think it could be perfect!

 

interesting stuff though, feel free to counter my argument!

[Guest earlgrey]

Hmmm, ok! Nah, nothing to counter that with. You're right, the difference between, say, two notes a semitone apart is much less than between the frequency bands we were taught to identify. Nevertheless, in general, experience with something improves your phenomenal discrimination - witness smokers who can identify different brands of cigarettes based on the smell, wine connoisseurs who can gauge vintage, and - uh - watmmers who can identify the signature sounds of the featured artists and don't just hear "noisy techno"

[Guest welcome to the machine]

Hmmm, ok! Nah, nothing to counter that with. You're right, the difference between, say, two notes a semitone apart is much less than between the frequency bands we were taught to identify. Nevertheless, in general, experience with something improves your phenomenal discrimination - witness smokers who can identify different brands of cigarettes based on the smell, wine connoisseurs who can gauge vintage, and - uh - watmmers who can identify the signature sounds of the featured artists and don't just hear "noisy techno"

 

hehe yeah I agree :) .

 

for relative pitch, the gaps between notes get allot larger when you go further up the keyboard, so your frequency training may very well help for the high notes.

 

I wonder if theres such a thing as perfect taste? as in someone who is born with the ability to taste the difference between two subtly different wines or whatever from near birth. that would be cool, i cant see any reason why it SHOULDN'T exist, maybe thats a skill really great chefs have, but its never been researched.. id like to think so :)