'Perfect Pitch' Sales Pitch

[firstbassman]

I’m sure many of you have seen the two-page ads near the back of guitar magazines. And the claims made sound a lot like “earn a million dollars in real estate with no money down!” But I was wondering if anyone has purchased and tried to learn the “system.”

http://www.perfectpitch.com/

Any validity? Any success? Thanks.

[If this topic has been discussed before, my apologies.]

[jdogric12]

I don't know for sure, but I'm 99.99999% sure perfrect pitch is something you are born with, not learned. However, I learned relative pitch from scratch with great success thanks to some great teachers and many many hours alone with a piano. Perfect pitch is a curse anyway. Everyone I know that has it, hates it, because if anything is slightly out of tune it drives them nuts, worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. Even recordings that are intune with themselves, but off from A440 (like A441, A439, etc) it still drives them nuts.

[firstbassman]

I think that is exactly his sales pitch (pun intended). That perfect pitch is not necessarily something one is born with and that it can be taught.

[jdogric12]

Nope. Pure rubbish.

[jimk]

Yeah, I agree JDog. Rubbish.

Save your money, boys & girls. I think it's a scam.

JimK

[firstbassman]

Well, my own intimate knowledge of such things is zero. And I have no financial attachment to the product at all. But my gut tells me that if we’re defining perfect pitch (as he does) as the ability to recognize (and identify) a specific note and the ability to reproduce (sing) a specific note then I think it is something that can be taught or at least developed to a higher degree than one might already possess.

[leftybass]

I have never liked the terminology 'perfect' pitch, I have always just likened it to being able to 'hear' music in a literal sense.

Even those that have the ability to 'hear' a note and identify it's value, ANY note or a combination of them, still need a point of reference. The sounds mean nothing until the values are understood, i.e. A-B-C-D-E-F-G and the sharps/flats that go along with them

Some people may have perfect pitch and may not even know it, for you have to have a basic understanding of the tones you hear in order to name them....

Having said this, I would think it difficult for those who have perfect pitch to be 'non-musical'....too hard to avoid.

[charlyg]

I bought the set years ago and started in. It's all about interval training, which is always a good idea. I didn't finish the sries, but grasped the concept of paying attention to the sound of different intervals. That is VERy helpful IMHO.

[johneek]

I was wondering if the point of the instruction was to identify intervals. Hear one note and then be able to know what note is a 3rd, 4th, 5th etc .above it. Some people can hear that naturally, but I think that others can "learn" to identify them.

My father had perfect pitch. I remember one night sitting at the piano, with my father in another room. I played a note and yelled to him, "Hey Dad, what note is that?" He thought about it for a couple of seconds and then said, "F#"....dead on. I was amazed. But as Jason has already mentioned, it drove him nuts, especially when he had to accompany singers. He was constantly debating with them what key the song should be in. They'd be certain that they needed to sing the song in a particular key, but my dad would know that they sounded better in a different key, mostly because they were closer to being on pitch. I remember sitting next to him and hearing him tell the band that they would play the song in the key he wanted, but they'd never tell anyone else. I heard more than one singer come up and say, "See, I told you it needed to be in F." My dad, would just smile and say, "Yeah the key you sang it in was certainly the right one!"