SteveB said:
Alvabass, I'm jealous!
I had 4 years of theory classes, and one of my classmates had perfect pitch. She was also 1st chair violin in the school orchestra, go figure!
I always marvelled at her skill. I have excellent relative pitch from my 4 years of courses.. ear training was something we did for a portion of every day. I think I was born with good relative pitch though, 'cause I never had to work at it. Too bad I didn't get perfect pitch!
But musically speaking, what really counts is having a good relative ear. I mean, perfect pitch is a cool ability. It's also cool to see others being impressed with that (you feel like an X-Man or something like that), but from the musical point of view is almost useless IMO. OK, maybe it can help you to figure out certain things faster, you don't need to carry a tuning fork, but learning to differentiate intervals regardless of the names of the notes is the real asset a good musician must develop (or be concerned about developing it). You don't need perfect pitch to recognize a Maj7-#9 chord. On the other hand, perfect pitch may be problematic at times. Fortunately I don't play a transpositional instrument like the alto sax, for instance (bass is a transpositional, but to an octave, so notes are spelled the same). It's so complicated to me to read or say a note name knowing that it isn't the real one. I feel I was lucky when I did my diploma concert on double bass: Solo double bass music is written in
scordatura, which means that you should tune the bass a major second higher for making it sound brighter. So if a piece is in G major, it is written in G major for the DB, but it sounds in A major. The accompaniment piano part is written in A major. Fortunately, when my diploma concert took place the university hadn't bought an acoustic piano for the auditorium and there was a Yamaha Clavinova there instead. My master agreed that it wasn't a good idea to tune the DB one second higher having orchestral tuning strings installed, so it was just a matter of hitting the transposition key in the Clavinova. There's a guy now who is practicing his DB diploma concert and doesn't have solo tuning strings in his bass (and nobody has them here, plus they're very hard to find and expensive), but now there's an acoustic piano in the auditorium, so he's transcribing all the piano parts one major second lower. That's such a task. Again, I feel I was very fortunate. I think it would take me double the time to learn those pieces played in scordatura.
One thing's for sure: Many people think that guys/gals with perfect pitch don't enjoy live music because they're always aware of out of tune or wrong notes. That's a true misconception. I enjoy live music as much as I can and only smile when I catch something wrong. Besides, you also can detect mistakes with great relative pitch alone. The only diference is that you can't tell note names if you don't have perfect pitch (is that necessary?).
I'm just recalling a single situation in which PP has proved to be VERY USEFUL to me: In the tropical music band I play, there are some tunes in which the pianist transposes his instrument one semitone lower because we decided at rehearsals to change the key and he's too lazy to relearn the song, so he just transposes the keyboard. After playing one of those tunes, most of the times he
forgets to return the piano to standard tuning. Fortunately he has the vice of playing some notes before the next tune starts and I always notice it ("Heeey!!! Watch out! The piano is transposed!!!" -it really pisses me off. Why doesn't he learn the tune in the new key??-). But he didn't do it a couple of times and it was a complete disaster. I remember once that we were going to play a tune which started with just the piano and the singer. We just played a "transposed" tune and he didn't "warn me" about that. When they started, no way to stop. I was in my mind like "Ewwww!", Just imagine the result when the rest of the band (a five-piece horn section plus bass and latin percussion) entered.
